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Better late than never, right?
Another month with only two shows.
The Faint
This show was on a Sunday, which meant I was of mixed mind about going to see it, even though I’ve been listening to these guys for 12 (12!) years. But we ultimately went and I’m glad we did. The Faint puts on a great live show. And the focus was the show—they had a few banks of colored lights, but aside from that it was just five guys on stage performing, no bells or whistles, which meant their performance had to be good because they had nothing to distract from it.
It was really good, and the crowd rewarded them with a ton of energy. They played about 20 songs, a quarter of which were from the latest album. Alas my two favorites—Total Job and I Treat You Wrong—were not on the set list, but that is just an additional reason to go seem them again, which I will certainly do if given the chance.
The Night Running Tour: Sunflower Bean, Spoon, Cage the Elephant, and Beck.
Spoon is another band I’ve been trying to see for 15-odd years so when we found out that they were (inexplicably) the second opening act of this mini festival tour, we were more than willing to show up early and camp out. Alas, the GC’s late hours plus rush hour traffic meant we got to the venue well into Spoon’s set. Which was freaking fabulous. This band can put on a show. And they did it without needing any crazy lighting or edgy videos or whatever to hold the audience’s attention. Seriously, they were so good. We managed to catch performances of The Underdog and I Turn My Camera On (alas, they didn’t play my hands down favorite, Finer Feelings, but again that’s just another reason to go see them again) and did an excellent job reworking some of the studio-created elements from the recorded tracks in a live setting. It was definitely worth the trouble we went through to see them.
Cage The Elephant was...fine. They were certainly the act that the majority of the audience was there to see, judging by crowd reaction. Cage the Elephant are something of a bells-and-whistles band: lots of pyrotechnics and lead singer went through multiple costume changes that included fencing masks, scarecrow outfits, and NASCAR onesies, before stripping down to some satin boxing trunks and bondage jewelry. They were entertaining enough to watch—the lead singer knows how to slink around on a stage—but eventually I just laid down on the blanket, pulled up an ebook, and let the music fade into the background.
Until it stopped. “They’re making us get off the stage,” the lead singer said. “We’ll be back if the rain lets up.”
( Pluvial Interlude )
Beck. Who it was well, well, well worth waiting out the torrential downpour and freezing cold afterward to see. Beck is also something of a bells-and-whistles performer, but you get the sense that he actually spearheads the whole thing, instead of handing a bunch of money over to videographers and lighting techs and letting them figure it out.
He kicked off with Loser—a bold move—and then moved on to Qué Onda Guero, Girl, Devil’s Haircut, Up All Night, and Wow. And then the music stopped. Oh crap, I thought, Not another storm.
Well, it wasn’t a storm, it was the venue telling Beck he had about 15 minutes to get off the stage. Which, WTF didn’t they truncate the Cage the Elephant set instead? So Beck played abbreviated versions of Saw Lightning and One Foot in the Grave, and then went straight to the encore, which was an extended version of Where It’s At with breaks in the middle for a couple of covers with Cage the Elephant and Spoon. The first I could have done without, but the latter? Beck and Spoon covering Elvis Costello’s Pump It Up was a serious live music high point among they many shows I’ve seen. I mean, how great is this?.
I have seen Beck three times now and he has never failed to disappoint. That encore would have been killer if he'd had the entire show to build up to it. Even without that, it was really, really good.
It would have been nice to end the night on that high point. But with the rain delay, the show had gone on an hour later than scheduled, which meant the traffic cops had all gone home, which meant accidents and gridlock as thousands of people ignored signal lights, stop signs, pedestrians in the road, and even which direction traffic in given lanes could legally go, in an effort to get the jump on one or two vehicles ahead of them. (There is much to back up the reputation drivers in this region have received.)
By the time we got home, I had precisely 101 minutes before I had to go into work. Which I managed to survive, having slept for a total of four out of the preceding 48 hours, through a cocktail of sugar, caffeine, and intense, laser-focused concentration. The effort left me with a persistent otherworldly sense of detachment (What is “verbal conversation”? What is “job”? Nothing is real…)
At least I had a glorious three-day weekend of Absolutely Nothing Planned At All to look forward to—or at least that’s what I’d thought—the GC and I had been discussing how great it would be pretty much daily for the past three weeks.
But then I logged onto my email to find myself CC’ed into an ongoing email chain (sans any of the preceding emails) discussing who was going to bring what to the cabin that weekend; all of this apparently, having been arranged in the past seven hours. (We are going to a cabin now? Nothing is real…)
It turned out the cabin was actually an Air B&B that we had collectively rented four months ago...and completely forgotten about. It was excellent too, but this post is already long enough.
これで以上です。
Another month with only two shows.
The Faint
This show was on a Sunday, which meant I was of mixed mind about going to see it, even though I’ve been listening to these guys for 12 (12!) years. But we ultimately went and I’m glad we did. The Faint puts on a great live show. And the focus was the show—they had a few banks of colored lights, but aside from that it was just five guys on stage performing, no bells or whistles, which meant their performance had to be good because they had nothing to distract from it.
It was really good, and the crowd rewarded them with a ton of energy. They played about 20 songs, a quarter of which were from the latest album. Alas my two favorites—Total Job and I Treat You Wrong—were not on the set list, but that is just an additional reason to go seem them again, which I will certainly do if given the chance.
The Night Running Tour: Sunflower Bean, Spoon, Cage the Elephant, and Beck.
Spoon is another band I’ve been trying to see for 15-odd years so when we found out that they were (inexplicably) the second opening act of this mini festival tour, we were more than willing to show up early and camp out. Alas, the GC’s late hours plus rush hour traffic meant we got to the venue well into Spoon’s set. Which was freaking fabulous. This band can put on a show. And they did it without needing any crazy lighting or edgy videos or whatever to hold the audience’s attention. Seriously, they were so good. We managed to catch performances of The Underdog and I Turn My Camera On (alas, they didn’t play my hands down favorite, Finer Feelings, but again that’s just another reason to go see them again) and did an excellent job reworking some of the studio-created elements from the recorded tracks in a live setting. It was definitely worth the trouble we went through to see them.
Cage The Elephant was...fine. They were certainly the act that the majority of the audience was there to see, judging by crowd reaction. Cage the Elephant are something of a bells-and-whistles band: lots of pyrotechnics and lead singer went through multiple costume changes that included fencing masks, scarecrow outfits, and NASCAR onesies, before stripping down to some satin boxing trunks and bondage jewelry. They were entertaining enough to watch—the lead singer knows how to slink around on a stage—but eventually I just laid down on the blanket, pulled up an ebook, and let the music fade into the background.
Until it stopped. “They’re making us get off the stage,” the lead singer said. “We’ll be back if the rain lets up.”
( Pluvial Interlude )
Beck. Who it was well, well, well worth waiting out the torrential downpour and freezing cold afterward to see. Beck is also something of a bells-and-whistles performer, but you get the sense that he actually spearheads the whole thing, instead of handing a bunch of money over to videographers and lighting techs and letting them figure it out.
He kicked off with Loser—a bold move—and then moved on to Qué Onda Guero, Girl, Devil’s Haircut, Up All Night, and Wow. And then the music stopped. Oh crap, I thought, Not another storm.
Well, it wasn’t a storm, it was the venue telling Beck he had about 15 minutes to get off the stage. Which, WTF didn’t they truncate the Cage the Elephant set instead? So Beck played abbreviated versions of Saw Lightning and One Foot in the Grave, and then went straight to the encore, which was an extended version of Where It’s At with breaks in the middle for a couple of covers with Cage the Elephant and Spoon. The first I could have done without, but the latter? Beck and Spoon covering Elvis Costello’s Pump It Up was a serious live music high point among they many shows I’ve seen. I mean, how great is this?.
I have seen Beck three times now and he has never failed to disappoint. That encore would have been killer if he'd had the entire show to build up to it. Even without that, it was really, really good.
It would have been nice to end the night on that high point. But with the rain delay, the show had gone on an hour later than scheduled, which meant the traffic cops had all gone home, which meant accidents and gridlock as thousands of people ignored signal lights, stop signs, pedestrians in the road, and even which direction traffic in given lanes could legally go, in an effort to get the jump on one or two vehicles ahead of them. (There is much to back up the reputation drivers in this region have received.)
By the time we got home, I had precisely 101 minutes before I had to go into work. Which I managed to survive, having slept for a total of four out of the preceding 48 hours, through a cocktail of sugar, caffeine, and intense, laser-focused concentration. The effort left me with a persistent otherworldly sense of detachment (What is “verbal conversation”? What is “job”? Nothing is real…)
At least I had a glorious three-day weekend of Absolutely Nothing Planned At All to look forward to—or at least that’s what I’d thought—the GC and I had been discussing how great it would be pretty much daily for the past three weeks.
But then I logged onto my email to find myself CC’ed into an ongoing email chain (sans any of the preceding emails) discussing who was going to bring what to the cabin that weekend; all of this apparently, having been arranged in the past seven hours. (We are going to a cabin now? Nothing is real…)
It turned out the cabin was actually an Air B&B that we had collectively rented four months ago...and completely forgotten about. It was excellent too, but this post is already long enough.
これで以上です。