Modern Minstrels

Mics Are For Singing, Not For Swinging

Eric and I went to see Jimmy Eat World with Taking Back Sunday and Mates of State in Oakland last night. It was at the Henry J Kaiser Arena (the basketball arena for a local college). Eric and I think there were about 1500 people at the show, so it's definitely the biggest show I've been to in quite some time.

We got there just as Mates of State's set started. They were composed of a female keyboardist and male drummer and they shared singing duties. A couple of their songs sounded a bit Arcade Fire-esque, though not nearly as complex given they only had two instruments. Overall they were pretty good. Though for some reason I had thought The Format were opening, but I guess they were only on the first half of the tour. So I was a little disappointed about not seeing getting to see The Format.

Taking Sunday were up next. The lights dimmed and some really epic sounding music played. Music that upon hearing you would expect one of the greatest bands on earth to come out...or a band that is just really full of themselves, and TBS is certainly the latter. Now that I think about it Good Charlotte did some similar shit on their tour, so there you go.

I wanted to enjoy Taking Back Sunday, I really did. They just really weren't that exciting to watch. Most of their songs sounded a lot different than the album versions. I couldn't quite figure out what it was, different effects on the guitar perhaps. And Adam used some sort of Robotizer on his voice for some songs which really didn't sound that good. I was amazed at how still the crowd was for most of the performance. The most jumping around was done during Your So Last Summer (too bad Flava Flav wasn't with them) and Cute Without the 'e' Cut From the Team. But I was really expecting a pretty crazy crowd for their set. The band just really never got the crowd into the show. During all of TBS's set there was only a small circle pit during part of one song. To contrast during all of Jimmy Eat World's encore there was a huge circle pit with ton's of people dancing. I will say I really enjoyed them breaking out the acoustic guitar for New American Classic and then following up that song with Cute Without the 'e'. That was definitely the best part of their entire set. The one other good thing I have to say about TBS is they played all their songs in one stretch and didn't do the whole lame encore thing.

Jimmy Eat Wold came on next and this is definitely who everyone was there to see. They opened by having Jim come on stage and singing (with no instruments) the chorus to Futures, and then the band came on one by one adding background parts and then they jumped into a song from Clarity. I really couldn't even begin to compose a setlist, but they definitely played a lot of songs with a good mix from Futures, Bleed American, and Clarity. They played a great set and interacted with the crowd very well. People were jumping, dancing, and singing pretty much constantly. I even enjoyed their performance of The Middle which is probably one of the most overplayed radio songs of all time. Jimmy Eat World put on a great show, and I definitely recommend seeing them if you get a chance.