So after lamenting that it'd had been a while since I'd seen a show, I made up for it by going on something of a live music bender. I ended up catching five shows and fourteen bands over the past eight days. I won't write about all of them, mostly because several of them have released CDs that I'll be writing about over the next week or two, and I don't want to use up all my clever adjectives in one post. But I will mention a couple of things.
The highlight of the past week? Definitely Monday night at Springwater. It started with Paper Hats. William Tyler plays with about 80 different bands (Lambchop, Silver Jews, Cortney Tidwell, among others) and I'd seen him play with several of them, so I knew he was good, but I didn't know he was THAT good. He's one of those musicians that kind of disgust me, because they hog up all the talent in the universe and leave poor schmucks like me with table scraps. Next was Festival, a sibling act who's ethereal folk pop filled with gorgeous harmonies reminded me of early Miranda Sex Garden (before they became a rock band). Closing the evening was Cortney Tidwell and her boys, who played a set of entirely new material, including one song that was a dead ringer for Black Sabbath. Based on last nite, if she gets her new album finished and out before December, she might top my year end list for the second year in a row.
Cortney Tidwell - "Missing Link" (mp3) from Don't Let The Stars Keep Us Tangled Up
The low point would probably be the two evenings prior to Monday... not because of the bands I saw, some of which were excellent, but because of the events surrounding them. I've decided to dub it "The Weekend of Bands That Took Entirely Too Long to Set Up." I'm self aware enough to admit most of my faults, and patience is definitely not one of my many virtues (being nice is however, so the guilty parties shall remain nameless). I wasn't too pleased standing around Saturday night watching a band that had the standard four piece instrumentation take half a fucking hour to set up. Unless you are playing at Madison Square Garden, it shouldn't take you thirty minutes to plug in a couple of effects pedals. Whats worse is that they took almost as long to breakdown after their set. Grab your shit and get off the damn stage so that the next band (the one I came to see) can play.
Sunday night ended up being even worse. I'm not so naive that I believe in advertised start times, but when I go to a show with a listed start of 9 pm, I don't expect that rock o'clock actually means 11, especially on a Sunday. But if I thought that would be the sole test of my tolerance, I was sadly mistaken. Later in the evening I watched a solo act take twenty minutes to set up a keyboard and an acoustic guitar. No effects, no complicated MIDI connections, just a cheap ass Casio with built in speakers. And it took twenty minutes to put a mic in front of it. Grrrr.
The Church - "Two Places At Once (Single Version)" (mp3) from Sometime Anywhere
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