I went to
this tonight, and it was amazing.
It went like this. Solid Gold at 4:30. Local band, sort of has a dark electronic/psychadelic feel, good melodies. I listened to their album a few times. They were pretty good live. Yeasayer was next at 5:45. I liked them more than I expected to. Very odd band with some fascinating instrumentation, but I can only get into a few of their songs. Calexico was next at 7:00. Not a big fan, but I loved the trumpets/cornets (and not much else). Their music is conventional mariachi/western stuff. Nothing too exciting. The frontman being embarassingly full of himself did not help. He did these "I'm the man" hand gestures and quasi-dance moves. He also tried to do several call/response bits with the crowd, all of which failed thoroughly. Solid Gold and Yeasayer were much better.
Then, at 8:30, as dusk begins to descend on Minneapolis, The Decemberists start a full contiguous performance of The Hazards of Love. Let me tell you, they have come a long long way since Austin. They are
precise and have a metric crapton of energy. The vocal performances are album-quality. I think it helped that the sound engineering was pretty much perfect throughout the day. Everything was very well balanced. (I should have yelled some compliments at the sound guy since I was standing next to the sound tent, but I didn't want to distract him, and I'm not good at yelling.) The mics were good, which was not the case at SXSW. Possibly the biggest difference, however, was Chris Funk's electric guitar playing. At SXSW, he was shy, and his guitar was awkwardly quiet. Tonight, he was playing like a rock star. He has seriously developed some skill with that instrument. During some of the noisy parts, he was clawing at the guitar like a madman, creating some seriously unique sounds. The songs rocked more than they do on the album, which was entirely appropriate for the live context. It's like they spread a delicious layer of rock-flavored jelly on top of, well, everything except "Isn't It a Lovely Night." The chemistry between the crowd and the band was remarkable throughout. It became obvious that the vast majority of the audience was there for the Decemberists. After Hazards, they did a half hour of old songs including a crowd participation piece that totally worked. They ended with a rocking Shara Worden / Becky Stark duet of "Crazy On You." (Yes, really.) The classic rock power vocals are to be expected from Shara Worden, but I had no idea Becky Stark could sing like that. The whole thing blew me away. Rock The Garden is supposed to be a 4-band package, but at the end of the night it felt like 3 bands had opened for the Decemberists. They stole the show in a more show-stealing fashion than I thought was possible.
