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Stephen Brodsky and John Darnielle cover Guns'n'Roses Stephen Brodsky opened. I liked his voice and his guitar style -- lots of distortion and low end, played on an acoustic guitar. He played a lot of covers, though. Songs by Neil Young, Willie Nelson, PJ Harvey, and others. A few songs by an old band of his, too. He seemed to have a large repertoire, but wasn't playing it all. I think maybe he had collaborators who didn't want him to play their catalog on a solo tour. I may check out  his recordings and find out if his own music is as good as his covers. John Darnielle came out and played a Guns'n'Roses tune with him, but it wasn't planned or rehearsed and they weren't consistently in the right key. It was delightful all the same. John Darnielle never disappoints me. I'd seen him twice before, unless you count the time I was stuck in the entrance line to Austin City Limits and had to listen to his show drifting across the festival grounds and...

From theymightbegiants.com A little over 10 years ago, my brother bought me a ticket to see They Might Be Giants with him in Tulsa. I got really excited about it. I was super into Flood, and I was going to get to hang out with my brother at one of my favorite places. Except it turned out the show was 18+, and so I didn't get to go after all. Ever since then, it's like there's been a cosmic curse. Every time TMBG plays somewhere near me, I find out about it too late, have an unavoidable conflict, or can't get a ticket. Not this time, gosh darn it. The Mountain Goats these days are John Flansburgh, John Linnell, Dan Miller, Danny Weinkauf, and Marty Beller. It's largely the John and John show, with John Flansburgh playing lefty electric guitar and joke interludes, pretending to call John Linnell under the guise of Mom and Pop They Might Be Giants. John Linnell plays keyboards and accordion. They both sing. The light show was pretty intense. There were came...

Kishi Bashi is a guy with a violin, a loop pedal, and some weird poems. He does some beatboxing to make background rhythms for his violin, and one of his songs was an epic poem about a Genesis-style Creation...? It was a weird experience. Very interesting, but I'm not sure I could say I enjoyed it. I hadn't seen Guster play in years. In high school, I photographed a concert at Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa for the student section of the city paper -- my friend Sarah wrote a review. My photos are mysteriously uncredited in the Tulsa World archive, but I was particularly proud of the title of the article, which was " Guster: Four-Man Wrecking Machine ". Guster is great to see live. Their songs are often upbeat in tempo, even when sad. They write an excellent pop song. Three guitarists trade instruments and switch off covering the bass. Brian Rosenworcel plays the drums with his hands most of the time, and sometimes the keyboardist plays a second set with sticks to ...

I don't like the way Alvvays sounds, and the sound was mixed terribly, so I couldn't understand what the singer was saying. If it doesn't sound good and I can't understand the content, there's really nothing left to appreciate. I guess I'll leave it at that. The first time I saw the Decemberists, it was 2004, and they were on The Crane Wife tour, playing shows with philharmonics in major cities. If that sounds like a high-budget venture, it probably was. That was the highest production value of any of their shows I'd seen, until this one. It's clear that the Decemberists have been doing well over the last decade. They're playing posh sit-down venues, which attracts a much older audience and is definitely not my favorite way to take in a show. I always end up very far away from the stage, for one, but the major problem is that the decorum expected in such a place. There is little cheering, almost no dancing, and you get no control over who you sit...