A semi-daily chronicle of my life as a musician, a family man, and a citizen of Oregon.

Dec 16, 2007

Spoon at the Crystal Ballroom

 

                                          Photo credit:Squid Vicious 

Last night I went with a few friends to see Spoon at the Crystal Ballroom w/ the Shaky Hands.  Believe it or not this is the first real show (ie concert you have to buy tickets to at an actual venue) I've been to since I moved to Oregon, so I'm excited about getting back into the flow of that again - this is definitely something I missed a lot.

I'm not too familiar with the Shaky hands, but they seemed to be pretty good and put on an energetic show.  They'll warrant follow-up.  Unfortunately, they had the classic opening-act problem of having to set up in front of Spoon's equipment and it seemed like they didn't benefit from the house PA which made them kind of hard to hear from the upper balcony where I was.  

Spoon's set was amazing.  They mostly stuck to tracks off of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and Gimme Fiction.  There were about four songs I wasn't familiar with and based on the lack of programmed lighting choreography, I'm thinking they might be new songs being road-tested.  Standouts from the show were the opening "Don't Make Me a Target", "Cherry Bomb", "The Ghost of You Lingers" (with amazing sound work by whoever they have running the boards), and "My Mathematical Mind".  I was glad that they pulled out a classic from Girls Can Tell "Anything You Want".

The one complaint I would have about the night was that Spoon only played one encore, and I was hoping they would play a lot more.