Dancing With Myself - Day 3 - The Concretes

So last night I went to the Paradise to see the Concretes. It was...different.

The opener was this Austrailian chick who calls herself New Buffalo. Very mellow, some nice songs, some boring songs. She played keyboard sometimes, backed up by her iPod, and also played a little guitar. For a couple songs she just pressed play on the iPod and sang, and walked around the stage kinda robotically. She was nice, but had like, negative stage presence.

Next up were the Concretes (once again, yay for only one opener!). Holy shit, there are like a hundred people in this band. OK, actually there were only eight. But still! There had to be at least 15 instruments on stage. Which was impressive considering that all their guitars had been stolen the night before, and most were borrowed and a couple bought that day. It was kind of an awkward moment when the lead singer told us in her broken English about it, the crowd didn't really know how to respond, it was kind of a bummer. Anyhow, there was her, two guitarists, a bassist, a keyboard player, a drummer (I couldn't tell if she was an albino or just really fair-skinned and bleached her hair), and two dudes in the horn section. The horn section had a sax, clarinet, flute, trumpet and french horn. There was also another keyboard over by the horn section that the brass guy played from time to time. I was just fascinated by the sheer number of instruments they played. An electric uekele? I think? An autoharp? A xylephone?! The guitarists also both switched off between electric and acoustics. Don't forget the hand bells and tambourines too.

Anyway, they were kinda neat, but pretty mellow too.

The elfin lead singer asked where a good bar was near there and the crowd reaction was mixed. One guy yelled out "Great Scott" and some chick was like, "Eww no! Go to the Sillohuette!" and some other chick was like, "No, not the Silly!" I thought the best suggestion was probably the Model, since supposedly that's where people go after shows.

I was considering going to the Pretty Girls show tonight, but I'm freakin' exhausted tonight, so I'm skipping it. Two shows in one week is pretty good anyway. I wish they'd been earlier in the week though, 'cause they're definitely my favorite of all the bands I saw, but I have seen them before, so I'll live. Oh, I got their two last albums too, very different from the first one, but awesome in a totally different way.

Anyway, tonight I'm just gonna be lazy, watch some OC, and hit the sack.