Modern Minstrels

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.