September 22, 2005
Impromptu Concert
My friend Mike called me at this afternoon and said he had an extra ticket to the Bloc Party show tonight. I've been listening to their CD off an on at work the last few months. It never made it into heavy rotation, but it is a good CD, so I took him up on the offer.
We left work around 6 and headed up to The City. We parked at the Metreon where we met another of Mike's friends and then grabbed some food before heading to The Warfield. The first band was The Noisettes, and they sounded much as their name implies. They were pretty good for an opening band. The drummer was pretty crazy with a full head of curly hair and fully beard. He totally looked like Animal from the muppets. The lead singer, this black British chick that could kick your ass had some pretty over the top dance moves.
The next band was a duo (male guitarist, female singer/bass player) called The Kills. The singer had the whole goth look going with long black hair, pale skin, black pants, black and white striped shirt. The music was similarly dark/industrial. They were alright, but not really my thing. The worst part about their set were these two big guys in front of us, who apparently thought this was the greatest band of all time. They were jumping and flailing around and being generally obnoxious to everyone around them. Fortunately they left after The Kills set. On their way out they said they were yelling to no one in particular, "thank you, Bloc Party sucks, up next shitty corporate rock". Uhh, Bloc Party hardly counts as corporate rock. But whatever, we were just glad they were gone.
Finally Bloc Party was up. They played a good set. The two crowd favorites where Banquet and Like Eating Glass. They played a handful of new songs, but for the most part the new songs didn't have that good dance beat a lot of their other songs have. Towards the end of the set (pre-encore) someone crowd surfed to the stage and then jumped back into the crowd. Apparently some young girl got kicked in the face when he did this, and the band stopped playing and got her up on stage and she went off with on of the stagehands. Then they of course scolded the guy that did it. When they came back for the first encore they said the girl was fine, which is good. Unfortunately, the show never got to the same energy level it had before the crowd surfing incident.
Overall the show wasn't anything super spectacular, but it was definitely a fun time and worth the $20.
September 18, 2005
Upcoming.org
Buzz recently told me about Upcoming.org, a social software site for keeping track of concerts and other live performances. There's over a thousand people registered for the San Francisco "metro", so it's got a decent user base. You can see my personal page here. I added all the shows mentioned in the previous post to my events.
The site has some cool features including RSS feeds, subscriptions for iCal, and "badges". I've added a Upcoming Concerts RSS feed for the site. You can subscribe here and I also put a link to it in the sidebar. I updated my concerts page to use their badge to generate my list of upcoming shows. I'm not taking advantage of the iCal subscription yet. The events are all listed as "all day events" rather than listing the event start time and they also don't show the venue. I'm not sure if that's a limitation in the webcal format or if they just didn't set it up to use those pieces of information.
I was hoping Upcoming.org would also be a good place to find out about new shows. There have been far too many times that I've found out about a show either after it's already sold out or after it already occurred. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how useful it's going to be in that respect though as the only event of the four I'm currently attending that I didn't have to create was Death Cab for Cutie. If anyone knows of a good central site (or better yet RSS freed) that gives listings of concerts (especially for indie shows) in the Bay Area, please let me know.
Update:
Buzz hooked me up with an invite to Sonic Living. It's a site similar to Upcoming.org, but seems to have fixed a lot of the problems I listed with Upcoming. First, they populate their show database on their own in addition to relying on users to add shows. All 4 shows I have tickets for in November were already listed on the site, so that bodes well. In addition the iCal subscription includes the show's start time and the venue so I should be able to use that as my concert calendar rather than keeping my own manual one. The site is currently in an invite only beta. I don't have any invite codes yet, but I imagine some will appear in my account soon, eventually so if you're interested let me know.
Also thanks to Jeff for pointing me to EVDB, I'll have to give that a look too. And thanks to Chris for reminding me of Pollstar. I wasn't aware of Pollstar's abilities to track up to 10 bands for you.
Rockvember
November is shaping up to be the single best concert month, ever. I've already got 4 shows scheduled: Nintendo Fusion Tour with Fall Out Boy, The Starting Line, and Motion City Soundtrack (which I blogged about here) the recently mentioned Video Games Live show, Death Cab for Cutie, and The Drive Thru Records Tour with Allister and Fenix*TX.
Death Cab for Cutie is touring in support of their brand new album, Plans. I can't wait to hear the new stuff live.
The Allister and Fenix*TX show should be lots of fun. I've seen Allister quite a few times before and they always put on an excellent show. They have a new album coming out in October, which is their followup to 2002's Last Stop Suburbia. They actually played a few new songs when I saw them in May 2004 at the Grog Shop in Cleveland and they sounded pretty good. Needless to say I'm anxious to hear the new album. Fenix*TX actually broke up a couple years ago, but they are getting back together for a farewell tour. Mike first introduced me to them during our freshman year of college. It will be cool to finally get to see them live.
September 17, 2005
Video Games Live
I found out about the Video Games Live concert in one of my weekly concert emails. I'm ordering tickets tomorrow for the San Jose show on Saturday November 5th. It looks like it's going to be a really cool show. If anyone else wants me to order them a ticket, let me know.
September 13, 2005
The Decemberists
After a nearly three month stint without going to any concerts, I finally made it to a show last Sunday and caught The Decemberists at The Fillmore.
Nick introduced me to The Decemberists a few months ago when he put On the Bus Mall up as a Song of the Week. They use a good number of instruments in their music including a violin, accordian, piano, and upright bass which makes for a fairly unique sound. Even though Nick had been pimping them several months ago, it was only within the few weeks that I started listening to them with any frequency. Fortunately, this was just in time that I was still able to grab a ticket before the show sold out (They actually played both Sunday and Monday and both shows sold out!). And boy am I glad I went as they put on an excellent show.
I found out on Friday that Buzz was also going to the show and he invited me to meet him and some of his friends at Pizza Inferno to grab some dinner before the show. We planned to meet at 6:30, so I left Cupertino just before 5:30 and got to the edge of The City just after 6. Unfortunately, there was apparently a Giants game that night which I was unaware of, so the last 3 miles of 101 before I got into the city itself took me just over an hour to get through. Ugh. After getting through that mess, I got to the fillmore area shortly after 7. Thankfully, there was a cheap parking garage nearby since I didn't see any street parking on my quick pass around the area. I finally made it to the restaurant and got some pizza shortly after 7:15. Buzz and friends were kind enough to wait while I ate my food and then we headed over to the venue and got there just as the opening band was started playing.
The first band was Sons and Daughters from Glasgow, Scotland. They're a four piece band (2 male, 2 female) with guitarist Scott and gutiarist/pianist Adele sharing vocal duties. I quite enjoyed their set. Their songs had excellent driving basslines and catchy choruses (Check them out on iTunes). They also broke out a mandolin for at least one song. I definitely plan to listen to more of their stuff.
Next up was Petra Haden and The Sellouts, an all female (10 singers total) group that did a cappella versions of songs from The Who Sellout. Sound crazy? It was, but it actually worked pretty well. I wasn't terribly familiar with the original album, but I definitely enjoyed their set. Our Love Was and Tattoo were my favorite songs they sang.
Petra also happens to be the violinist (and backup vocalist) for the headliners, The Decemberists. They took the stage to some pretty spiffy intro music and then immediately broke into 16 Military Wives. They had good energy all night and played a nice long set. The craziest part of the set was the jam session that occurred during the encore. They broke into a jam and then Colin (lead singer/guitarist) pulled this lady out of the crowd and gave her his guitar. She didn't seem to know how to play, but that didn't stop her from jumping around and strumming like mad. The bass player similarly brought up a young guy to take over bass duty. Over the next few minutes all the band members switched up instruments. The best switch was the bass player taking over for the drummer without a missed beat.
Songs I can remember they played:
- 16 Military Wives
- Odalisque
- Grace Cathedral Hall
- The Legionnaire's Lament
- Billy Liar
- The Chimbley Sweep
- We Both Go Down Together
- Eli, The Barrow Boy
- The Sporting Life
It was a great show, all three bands played excellent sets and was definitely worth the trip despite the whole getting stuck in traffic suckage.
Other notes from the evening:
Peter and the Wolf was played during one of the intermissions. Cool!
The Fillmore is a great place to see a show, because they often give out free posters after shows, so I now have a spiffy Decemberists poster to hang in my office.
I highly recommend you check out The Decemberists on iTunes.
It seems like as I was watching the show there were more things I wanted to be sure and mention in this blog post, but I can't remember what they are now. Oh well.