Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Another Awesome Show...

On Friday night, my friend M and I headed down to House of Blues for what turned out to be another fantastic show. Before I get to the headliners, I should mention that we were quite pleased to discover that both of the opening acts were actually pretty great. Things started with Dutchess and the Duke, a cool little 3-member Seattle folk band, who were pretty amusing when interacting with the crowd and also sounded great. They were followed by The Dodos, a San Francisco indie rock band who rocked pretty hard. I'm tracking down a few of their albums right now, and looking forward to adding them to the collection. It's a rare occasion to enjoy one opening act, so enjoying two was a nice bonus... Then, things got even more awesome when The New Pornographers took the stage...
There were 8 or 9 people on stage at all times (with Dan Bejar drifting on and off as it's apparently more fun to drink backstage when you're not immediately needed onstage), which could be an unruly size but instead just resulted in a whole lot of awesome...
A surprisingly witty and cool Carl Newman and the awesome Neko Case were front and center, of course...
Dan Bejar was around from time to time, too, and Kathryn Calder (on the right in the picture below) took care of the rest of the lead vocals.
The band sounded amazing, and you could tell that they love playing together (or are very very good at faking it). With that many people on stage, it was fun listening to the layers of vocals and instruments coming together perfectly. These guys are good. They opened with Sing Me Spanish Techno, closed the main set with Bleeding Heart Show, and played all manner of awesomeness from their whole catalog in between. One odd moment came when a fan(?) threw a CD at Carl Newman... a video of which has now been circulating the interwebs.

It's one of those things that could throw off the vibe of a show, but Newman was super-cool about it (including joking after the above clip ended that they have a plant in the audience at their shows to throw CDs at them in order to get the crowd riled up...) and it ended up being just leading to one of the more amusing moments of the night thanks to Neko going off about it. In summary: The New Pornographers are totally and completely awesome live. Go check them out if you get the chance...

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