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Built to Spill

September 16, 2006 12:07 PM

o, on Thursday night, Ryan and Elise and I went and saw the Built to Spill concert. It was awesome.

The opening band, however, sucked worse than almost any other band I've ever seen. They were called Helvetia or some such shit. They were fucking worthless. Their songs didn't end, they stopped. They were half-assed. They were not dynamic or interesting. The guitarist was a one-trick pony: instead of playing a guitar solo, the guy would turn on this strange phaser/pitch shifter effect and then play a guitar. What a fucking douchebag.

That's another thing, the lead singer was clearly a giant douchebag. Which is bad.

Moreover, the opening band was constantly looking down at the floor, obviously looking at either the playlist or some indication of how the rest of the song went. In fact, they fucked up a good number of times.

And the guy couldn't sing to save his life. Not once throughout the performance was the guy actually in the right key. Or in any key, for that matter. It was fucking bad.

Built to Spil, however, was awesome. It's strange because when you hear the music, you don't expect the band to look the way they do. At first, I thought the band had hired a group of grizzly-fighting mountain men to be their roadies. But the Ryan told me that that was, in fact, the band. I swear, they look like they've been up in the mountains for months without the benefit of razors or . . . anything. They looked grimy, to say the least.

But they rocked. They've been a band for a long time, and they know how to put on a show. They played a lot of the major BtS songs, although I was disappointed that they didn't play "Car," my favorite.

Their encore was a 17-minute version of a song whose name I can't remember. Maybe Ryan can help me out.

Ryan and I stood pretty much right next to the speakers, so by the time the show was over, my hearing out of my left ear was somewhat impaired. But it was worth it, the show kicked ass. And I hadn't seen good live music in way too long.



1 Comments


RPM said:

The encore song was "Broken Chairs." The studio version is about 9 minutes long. The three guitar assault can extend any song forever. The show kicked ass. Even when they reduce it to two guitars and one guy sitting down, drinking a beer and smoking,

I also wished they had played "Car." I wanna see the movies of my dreams. I also wanna see it when you get stoned on a cloudy breezy desert afternoon. I wanna see it untame itself and break its owner. I wanna see it now.

September 16, 2006 4:14 PM



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