Night of Nights

Friday night was the culmination of all my rock & roll dreams come true. Well, pretty much. There was no BD/HL throwdown for my affections. But I did get to see my two very favorite bands (The Walkmen and Spoon for those of you sitting in the back) play fantastic sets, and take a super fun mini-road trip with extremely awesome people.

Jenna, Will, Alyssa, Mitchell and I piled in my VW and made the way up 95 to Charm City. Mitchell managed to find every ridiculous track hidden in my iPod. I didn't even know I had some of the stuff he found. It made for a boom-shaka-lakin good time on the drive up. We got to Sonar just as White Rabbits were finishing, which is a shame because I thoroughly enjoyed them at Otto Bar. Sonar is very cool -- the stage should be a little higher for that big a space, but I didn't have many complaints otherwise.

The Walkmen played a set mostly of new material, and mostly of the new new material I haven't heard much of yet. They have a song called "Canadian Girl" that is faaaaaaantastic. And "On The Water" is a CCR & Johnny Cash-inspired barn burner. They also played "The Rat" for the first time in a while, as well as old favorites "Wake Up", "All Hands & The Cook", "Another One Goes By"... that may have been it for old songs. The band was in high spirits -- I've never seen Ham be such a talky bird on stage. Unfortunately, they were openers, so no encore or long set. But it was still awesome. And the Walkmen newbies in my group liked it too, so, yay.

Then, SPOON! God, they are really just the best band around. The set, much like the one from the 9:30 Club a few months back, pulled from their entire catalog. They opened with "Chicago At Night" and hit high points across all their albums. They had the Antibalas horn section with them, which filled out a lot of their songs nicely. The new album obviously has a lot of horns, but they brought them in on some older ones just for a little extra, which was nice. They played a 2nd encore -- in which they covered the Rolling Stones' "Rocks Off", which was badass. They sounded completely and totally perfect and I couldn't have asked for anything more. Really.

The End.