Probably Should Have Wrote This Up a Month Ago

Early last month (the 4th, in fact), Branny and I went to see The Hold Steady at First Avenue. We hit up a bar shortly before the event, and had a blast at the show. The Whigs opened, and started the concert off with the infamous "Tomahawk Chop" music - Atlanta bastards. They were actually quite good, and even got a chuckle in when the lead singer "admitted" that Gant fell off first base without any "help" from Hrbek, pulling off his overshirt to reveal a Twins jersey. The Hold Steady came on and killed. Overall, I got hoarse from excitedly shouting along with every song, and the whole night is one of my fondest musical memories.

Courtesy of the Hold Steady Taped Show Archive, I now have the bootleg of the concert. Well, a replay of it, anyway. It seems the Current played the show in its entirety shortly after the 4th, and it was recorded and encoded into VBR-0 MP3 format. The sound quality is quite good, if a little light on the bass. Craig's voice is a smidge rough (especially in the beginning), and the DJ from the radio rebroadcast breaks into the audio in between a couple of the songs to chime in mentioning what it is that you're listening to (he only appears over crowd noise, nothing of importance is lost), but overall, it's a fantastic way to remember a great show at a great venue.

Doomtree Blowout V

Branny and I attended the annual Doomtree blowout on Saturday night. It was easily one of the best, most energetic concert experiences I've been a part of.

I enjoyed the format of the show, with the entire group performing for about a half an hour, then splitting into individual sets for each of the members (with extremely short interludes in between), before coming back together for the grand finale. The group has great chemistry, and since this was the first time they'd all been together since the previous year's blowout, you could tell they were really feeding off each other and the excitement of the crowd.

I've been a big P.O.S. fan since seeing him live a couple years ago, but I had no idea that the rest of the Doomtree crew was that good. Cecil Otter had a great set, playing with live instruments, which really accentuated his metered spoken word style. Dessa commanded attention every time she opened her mouth, I'll definitely have to hunt down some of her stuff. Sims and Mictlan put on good shows, too (even if the planned world premiere of Mictlan's new music video kept experiencing technical difficulties - it got funny toward the end, when the show was effectively over, the problems let up and we got to see what ended up being a fairly blase video).

P.O.S.' Never Better will almost certainly (spoiler alert!) be my number one CD of 2009, but it still can't even touch the raw sound it has when he's rapping live. He has a fire that I haven't seen from many other performers. He only did 5 or 6 of his own, songs, but he touched on all the biggies (thankfully, he got everyone together to sing "Low Light Low Life", a personal favorite of mine off Never Better.)

The crowd knew every word to every song (seriously, I'm not sure I've ever seen such audience participation at a show before), and more than once, you could see the performers looking at each other in disbelief at how stoked the crowd was to be there.

Seriously, anyone from the Cities area who's even remotely a fan of this group owes it to themselves to check out next year's blowout. For fans of the Doomtree collective or any of the individuals that make it up, it is not to be missed.

Children 18:3 @ Club1

After hearing about Children 18:3's legendary (at least locally legendary) live shows for years, I finally witnessed the spectacle first hand last night.

Suffice it to say, they are one of the most energetic and frenzied live bands I've ever seen. Seth Hostetter might be the bet drummer I've seen, and that's not something I say lightly. If that's what they play like when they're sick and not feeling 100%, I can't imagine what they'd do when everything was clicking.

The band hit up all my favorites, blending seemlessly between 'All My Balloons' and 'LCM' before tearing into 'Time and Wasted Bullets' and pretty much keeping the needle pegged the entire time - with one short break to, in their words "catch [their] breath". Everything from begining to end was a furious blaze of flying guitars, almost impossibly fast drumming, and just an overall sense of ROCK.

I highly recommend seeing the band live. It's no secret I greatly enjoyed the CD, but seeing the show completes the experience.