Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Wed Recap: This Holiday Life & Writer @ U-31, 2.27.08

Show by show, I'll get my pictures posted. Last Wednesday, I headed down to U-31 to catch Writer, as they were told they'd be on at 9. There was some confusion, however, so they actually played third in the lineup. For me to take pictures, there's a certain comfort I have to feel in a venue, and at that early point in the night, I wasn't feeling it, so I found the Swim Party guys who were hanging out in the back, and we all found a booth and shot the shit during the first two acts, though while hanging outside with Andy, he pointed out that Red Letter Agent sounded a lot like Travis. So for every song, we would name the Travis equivalent, until it was time to load their stuff on stage.

I wanna mention quickly that I was told there were over 100 paid people through the door, which to me, was pretty remarkable for a fairly new venue, and bands that aren't necessarily in the Casbah loop just yet. However, it also should be noted that it would be nice if the DJ matched the bands. To go from a sounds-like Travis band to dancey nightclub stuff was odd, and even more weird was the dude who was playing drums along to the dance music. WTF with that?

At that point I was over my camera shyness, and stepped right up with Alex, Petro and Eric to watch them and take some pictures. I was happy for once to take pictures with a colored background- note to Natalie that I think your photography would be amazing here.





After Writer, it was already kinda late, so I knew I'd missed the Muslims at the Ken Club, so I stayed for the first half of This Holiday Life's set. This was more rocking than I remembered from the Beauty Bar, but that was also the night I left after a couple songs because I'd forgotten my camera battery at home, so maybe this was just the half of the set I missed. I like them, though perhaps I should've picked up a CD because I can't really put my finger on their sound. I should also note that the singer's wife/girlfriend/partner brought their baby to the show, so it was adorable to see this tiny baby with giant air traffic controller ear protection on.



I had been playing phone tag with a friend, so when I got the call that the Ken Club was still going off, I headed back home. There I talked to the Muslims and was told that for the kick off of "Commune", there were over 130 through the door. To me, that was pretty damn good evidence that for the right events, people will come out to play on school nights, so good work to the girls behind Commune and to Erika and Peggy at U-31 for building a really strong and usually ignored weeknight. I'll be back to U-31 on Wednesdays for sure and look forward to seeing where the next Commune is held.

1 comment:

Natalie said...

I wasn't that impressed with U-31 the one time I was there, although it could have been the crappy band I saw. I did notice that the lighting was decent though. It's going to take me a little while to get over the awesomeness that was the lighting at The Independence in SF though. Seriously - why don't more venues invest in better lighting systems?