The National with Other Lives at Cain's Ballroom, 4/19

You, reader, are lucky. You're lucky because you get to view my low-light, scratched-first-gen-iPhone-camera-lens photos of The National. What a boon.

The show was epic. It started out with a set by Other Lives, who looked puzzlingly familiar to me all night long until they walked off stage and someone near me said the word "Kunek". And then it hit me. I'd seen Kunek perform during Welcome Week, my freshman year of college, at the union. I was trying to figure out when at Austin City Limits 2010 I'd caught their act. But they didn't look that familiar.

Other Lives sounded great. The preponderance of musical instruments they brought with them looked like a parody of a stage set. A veritable obstacle course. Every member of the band played at least two instruments in every song, though the average per band member (if you exclude the drummer from the data set) was probably closer to four. They had everything, from guitars and keyboards to bells tied to deer antlers with ribbons: the ultimate in hipster instrumentation. Other Lives changes instruments like other bands change chords. And to a certain extent, that's cool -- I'm all about multi-instrumentalists. They clearly have talent. But at some point, you have to leave the studio and adapt your performance to make sense on a stage. The constant instrument-flipping started to seem pretentious. Over-the-top. However, when I'm done feeling the resentment, I'll check out their record -- I imagine it sounds great recorded.

I'm a casual fan of The National. I heard of them once, freshman year of college, but never followed up until fate and my friend Cliff caused me to end up at their Austin City Limits set. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and bought their 2010 record High Violet. That's about the extent of my fandom, but when I heard they were coming to Tulsa I decided it was worth the price of the ticket and the drive down. As it turns out, I was right.

Happily for me, they played a lot from High Violet. Here's the setlist:

• Runaway
• Anyone's Ghost
• Mistaken for Strangers
• Bloodbuzz Ohio
• Slow Show
• Squalor Victoria
• Afraid of Everyone
• Conversation 16
• All the Wine
• Abel
• Sorrow
• Apartment Story
• Green Gloves
• England
• Fake Empire
  --
• Driver, Surprise Me
• Mr. November
• Terrible Love
• Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks

The set was pretty solid, and I enjoyed the hell out of it, despite the asshole behind us and his annoying girlfriend directing her beer-scented shrieks into my right ear. But it was the encore that made the show.

During Mr. November, Matt Berninger, the lead singer, jumped off the stage and over the rail, taking his microphone on a mad dash through the entire crowd, disappearing behind the sea of people that quickly swallowed him. His mic cord was ridiculously long, and the audience passed it hand-over-hand over their heads to keep up with him. He made the circuit of the crowd and ended up back on stage in time to jump off of it again for Terrible Love, this time balancing on the rail, which was maybe three inches wide and supporting his weight on the hands of various audience members (myself included) as he wobbled back and forth somewhat drunkenly, with one hand holding the mic and two security guards looking freaked out and holding his legs from behind.

The last song was Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks, which they performed unplugged, with two acoustic guitars, the occasional floor tom strike, and a lot of crowd participation. It was really kind of magical, maybe especially because it was so different from the vibe of the previous songs. I'd never seen anyone try to sing to that many people without a microphone before, and was grateful to be in the second row, since I could still pick out the voices of the band over the audience.

One of the techies had brought out an unopened bottle of white wine for the singer, who'd been serving himself from a bottle kept cold in a plastic bucket on stage all night, and he pushed it into the hands of some girls right in front of us who really didn't seem old enough to possess it. Maybe it was because they were really short. I forget that people are just short sometimes.

It ended well, with both closure and regret. It's always disappointing to see a band who doesn't know how to end their set, or a band you're not sorry to see walk off stage. When my first thought after the last song is how good it will be to sit down, or to buy a drink, I feel like something is missing. I didn't have this problem with The National.

The day after the show, I tried to listen to their record while I was working in the lab. I remembered something my friend Cliff told me the first time he played them for me, though: you should never listen to The National when it's light out. And, really, the recording's kind of a let down after the live show, too.