This past weekend, I was lucky enough to get to see The Magnetic Fields play in Raleigh, NC at the Meymandi Concert Hall. The show was truly memorable.
The band played their set all acoustic which is interesting because their new record has a lot of distortion in its production. The songs performed more pared down sounded incredible. A lot of it also had to do with the amazing acoustics of the venue, which was definitely set up for classical music. During the show, the power went out, but the sound of the instruments still carried well in the hall.
The show was so good, I hope that the band plans to record a live record from this tour. They played songs both new and old, which prompted me to want to re-visit some records of theirs I don't listen to as much right now.
I went to the Black Cat Tuesday night to see Jay Reatard play. It was a good crowd of mostly dudes, but the show was really great. The openers were the Cola Freaks, a really high energy punk band from Denmark. The lead singer was really intense and he went into the crowd and had people scream into the mic.
I've been listening to a lot of Jay Reatard records recently, particularly Blood Visions. He was pretty fantastic live- reminded me of punk shows I saw in college. He played his set with very little break between songs, and I'm betting that in my younger days, I would have wanted to get in on a mosh pit.
