DCaffeinated

Life. Inside the Beltway. Outside of Politics. Mostly.

6.17.2005

No Sleep 'til...

After work nap. Coffee. Bloc Party.

Amazing. For those of you unable to acquire tickets, I am truly sorry. Although I would have loved to have seen you there rather than the beefcake bonanza that it appeared to be at times, you missed a great concert at which the band played a really tight set while staying loose on stage. I'm hard pressed to say who I got a bigger kick out of, the lead singer, Kele Okereke, who played off of the crowd, taking flowers, requests, and dollar bills, or the drummer, Matt Tong, who rocked out with his bouncing feathered hair and trash-'stash galore (perhaps there'll be pictures later!).

Thoughts from the evening:

1. Now I know what bands do when they only have one album. They play every song on the album without question. You'll have to check out some other blog for a set list, but off the top of my head, I don't think they played a song that wasn't on the album. And I don't think that they missed any songs either. 14 songs on a Thursday night is good enough for me.

2. Early on in the show there were balloons bouncing around the crowd. Then, once a balloon landed on stage and Kele picked it up and said something about it, they all disappeared into people hands. No more fun bouncing balloons. One woman ended up with two of them. What the hell are you going to do with a balloon from a concert? Hang it on your wall until it shrivels up like testicles in cold water? Fucking lame DC, fucking lame.

3. No dancing. For once I'm not going to blame the DC hardcore scene or the crowd for this one. After some introspective thought, I came up with two reasons why people no longer dance at concerts. A. People come to see the bands. When they dance, or are surrounded by people bouncing up and down, they can no longer focus solely on the band and the music. As a corollary to this point, people pay too much money to casually attend and not pay attention to the band. B. Since concerts have become a major moneymaker for bands and venues, the venues pack in as many paying customers as possible, making it impossible to comfortably dance without elbowing your neighbor. No space=no dancing. These two points don't even touch on the growing self-consciousness of American adolescents and young adults.

4. Before the encore, the crowd just sat there expectantly. No real sign of appreciation or strong desire to drag the band back out. Sure, there were two technicians on stage tuning, but if I was in the band, and the audience wasn't clapping and chanting, I wouldn't come back out on stage. Weird. But then again the whole night was a little off. Like the older DC-indie crowd had gone to the Modest Mouse concert, leaving the younger kids who didn't know their ass from a whole in the wall to act like spoiled brats. Just a random thought.

5. I'm kinda glad that I didn't go to see the Pixies/Bloc Party on Monday night because I'd bet that they played the same set. Since they don't have any other songs. Maybe I'm wrong though. I frequently am. Hopefully they'll come to Austin on their next tour. Cause they fucking rocked like stars.

6. Why don't I get coffee more frequently at shows? The legs never got tired, the mind never drifted too far... Oh yeah, cause now I can't sleep. Thank god I'm taking tomorrow off. Suckers. (is it wrong to make fun of your readers?)

1 Comments:

  • im pretty jealous of you - bloc party definately in my sounds of this summer

    By Blogger AMS, at 10:54 AM  

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