Last night (Thursday) I saw Bat for Lashes live. It was a really good concert!

You may have heard about Bat for Lashes from their awesome, creepy music video from 2007.

I got the album (Fur and Gold) after hearing that song and was mostly disappointed. The other songs just didn’t seem to have the depth and feel as that song. So then recently this year I heard Daniel on Last.fm.

Very cool song! Especially when you realize what it’s about!

Wes: Khan said in an interview with The Sun newspaper that Daniel was based on a fictional character that she fell in love with as a teenager.

she fell in love with daniel-san?

The Karate Kid! So then I got that album (Two Suns). It was better than the first one, but I still wasn’t feeling it.

Well, last night I convinced myself to see the show because the band makes such good music videos that the show could theoretically be really great. Well fortunately I was right, objectively speaking!

The whole band was spot on with sound. The main thing that I noticed was that the synth was weirder and the drums and bass were louder, giving them that sound I’d always hoped and dreamed for. I have a theory that when the band records, the label (presumably) turns up the sound on the singer’s voice, makes the synth mostly chill, and relegates the D&B to the background so that the music will be more palatable to the masses. I haven’t done any research at all on this, but I can say that their performance was great live, and their albums are mostly mediocre (to me).

My only complaint was that the concert was at The Loft, which is part of The Palladium. The Palladium has bad sound, is in a sketch part of town, and is just bad in general. Here are some examples comparing The Palladium to The Granada (my favorite venue of all time.)

1. The Granada, while small, has multiple floor levels, so you never get stuck behind tall people. The Palladium is flat.
2. The Granada has a bar, but it’s well partitioned from the concert area, so the annoying loud drunk people don’t spoil the show. The Palladium, not so much.
3. The Granada has a dedicated photographer who will email (and post on flickr) any pictures he takes of the show. With the Palladium that’s not the case, so when you are trying to watch the show you see annoying people taking pictures instead of watching the show.

Overall though, I’d give the concert 4 stars; and it would be 5 if it weren’t at The Palladium.

I saw CKY this past Friday and it was a most excellent concert.

I saw two of their three openers. The first one was vanilla boring metal. Only worth mentioning for completion.

The second band was Graveyard. They were very interesting. I think they are classified as Blues Metal. It sounds ridiculous, but the music was alright! They were reminiscent of a Metal version of the Allman Brothers. Certainly worth checking out.

Then cKy, the headliner, started playing. They were great performers. They didn’t have any kind of setlist and almost entirely played requests, which was pretty cool.

One thing that was interesting about them is that they refuse to allow silence in their concerts, so if they aren’t playing, the audience needs to be cheering. When silence did occur they would play really cheesy eighties music as punishment. That was pretty hilarious. They even came out to Billy Jean, which was pretty awesome.

There was one point at which they asked for songs to play and after a few minutes of people calling out songs, the guitarist said they could only play half of the requests. So they started playing one of the songs and at some point in the song the guitarist said, “Wait wait wait! I said half!” so then they switched songs. They did this a few songs and ended the medley with Michael Jackson’s Beat It. That was pretty excellent.

The last thing worth mentioning was that the parents Margera were there and April Margera came up to sing along with the last song. That was pretty cool.

Anyway, if you are local and want to come to a concert (J-Dot) here is a link to my concert calendar.

Saturday night my roommate and another friend went to see Astronautalis. He was actually sandwiched between Valina and The Paper Chase. Valina was a generic rock band that I can’t imagine ever going to see just for them. They just didn’t seem to bring anything special to the table. The Paper Chase were Dissonant Rock and most of their songs sounded the same. We left after their fourth song I think.

But Astronautalis’ show was awesome. I’ve never been to a rap concert per se, so some of the things that I note are probably typical, but on the other hand, Astronautalis’ music isn’t like most rap (evidenced by the fact that I like it.) He first came on stage and greeted us all. He has a little routine he does around the songs, which isn’t that unusual, except for the fact that his routines turn into freestyle rap sometimes, which was pretty cool. He gave us advice that to survive in these tough economic times we should steal from people, or more specifically, family and friends, because unlike strangers, family and friends won’t ask questions. It was pretty hilarious. So then he went on to do various recorded songs, most of them from Pomegranate.

Basically he would play the track from his laptop and rap/sing the song. He had a ton of energy while he was performing. He looked like he was gonna get an aneurysm and moved his hands around a lot to symbolize the lyrics. It was awesome.

About halfway through the show he did a freestyle (and asked the audience for topics) and nailed it. I was surprised that his lyrical style (very much like that of Collin Melloy’s: almost mythical, with a moral to the story) came through loud and clear despite the fact that he was making up the lyrics on the spot. Again, this may be typical of rap music, but I was still surprised.

It was a really cheap show too, $14 at the door, so that was awesome. When we left The Paper Chase we went to talk to Astronautalis where he was selling merch. He seemed like a cool guy and we all got to shake his hand and buy a couple of his albums. Next time he is in Dallas I am definitely going to see him again. It was a great show.

I’ve decided that seeing a concert warrants a blog post, and that a concert blog post can fill in for an Album of the Week post. If I pay the money to see a concert (typically more than the cost of a CD) I probably like the band that much With that in mind I present to you my most recent concert: The Flight of the Conchords.

You’ve probably already heard of Flight of the Conchords. It was the biggest single concert I’ve ever been to by far. (The Flaming Lips was actually a festival so that doesn’t count.) According to the band there were somewhere between four thousand and six thousand people there. Wow. Most concerts I go to have somewhere between one hundred and five hundred people. FLOTC is a comedy band that has a show on HBO. Typically I prefer to see their live stuff on Youtube though, so a concert seemed perfect.

The tickets weren’t very expensive. Thirty five + ticketsuckster fee totaled to something like forty seven dollars. We actually arrived a little late so we hardly saw any of the opener, so I won’t comment on him at all. The transition from the opener to band was instant, which is excellent. The band came out in robot costumes and performed “Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor.” They changed into normal clothes while the lights were off and after that it was basically songs and between song chit-chat. The music was great and the talking between was also very good.

My only major complaint was the audience. I go to plenty of concerts, probably at least one, if not two, per month. The people at this concert just did not know how to behave! First off, it seemed that a large portion of the crowd felt obliged to get up and get a beer every 15-20 minutes, so of course we are standing up to let them pass or the people in front of us are or even the people behind us are knocking our heads with their largely shaped behinds as they squeeze out to the aisle to get one more carb packed alcoholic beverage. And then of course there was the people that had to yell to their bro five seats down that they really liked the current song. At first I thought I was just being uptight, but my two compatriots agreed that it was extremely obnoxious.

Anyway, I give the concert a four out of five rating. Everything was great except for the use of a certain ticket provider and certain audience members.