Happy New Year!

Well, it's a new year and a fresh start. I think resolutions can sometimes be unrealistic, but the only one I firmly set for myself was to get this blog up and going, and post as often as I can. It's difficult since there are only so many concerts that I attend any given month, but I'll try to write about other interesting things happening in music.

So for my first post I'm going to talk about Alt-J. After continually missing seeing them live (I swear every time they played I was either busy or it sold out in seconds), I was finally able to procure a ticket. They played at the Crystal Ballroom on December 2nd with the band Genders as their opener. Genders are a local Portland band, and I thought they were quite good. Then Alt-J came out, and it was just as trippy as I thought it would be. Joe Newman's voice is so different from any other musician I've ever heard, and I was immediately drawn into the unusual yet mesmerizing sound.

The band were very good live, although from all of the hype and anticipation, I was slightly let down. Joe's voice was often flat, and there were some notes that he couldn't quite hit. I had a friend at the show who had seen them twice before and said he was like that at every show. I'm hoping that will eventually change and he won't have that issue so much in the future. When my parents saw Silversun Pickups for the first time they weren't quite as together as they should have been, and Brian Aubert's voice wasn't hitting the right notes. But the second time they saw them when I was there as well, they were all spot on and it was a great show, so maybe that will be the same story for Alt-J.

Either way, I'm glad I finally got to see them, and I ended up meeting some cool people who had also come alone. We sort of joined together inside Ringler's pub next to the Crystal and started talking. What brought the two over (apart from me sitting alone) was the fact that I had managed to tap into Alt-J's bus's Wi-Fi. As I was telling the waitress that, they both overheard and we all came together.

After the show one of their (hot) roadies gave me a setlist. When I was waiting for my ride outside of the Crystal a drunk girl befriended me and we waited for our subsequent rides together. It turns out that Grimes had parked their car too close to Alt-J's equipment van, and the (hot) roadie that gave me the setlist was standing by it waiting for someone to come move the car so he could load up. The drunk girl and I walked over to him (since he wasn't busy) and started chatting. It was fun hearing him talk just to hear his wonderful accent. He told us about the tour, how it was a lot of work but fun to see new places, that the shows in the US were smaller and less crazy than the shows in Europe, and that he's been on tour with them for over a year. He was very nice. Then Genders moved their car and he had to start loading, and drunk girl and my rides arrived at the same time. A pleasant way to end the show.

Setlist

The bus's Wi-Fi (I correctly guessed the password)