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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...

Jake Bellows We went to Omaha for Christmas, and I did my best to contain my Saddle Creek enthusiasm, in favor of family time. But on Christmas Eve eve, I received intelligence that Neva Dinova was playing a reunion show -- the first time in the six years since the band broke up that they had played a show. Since the band had no intention of ever playing a show again, and since tickets were not only available but only $10, I was pretty psyched. We headed to the slowdown, and met Jacob's brother and his girlfriend for drinks. I hadn't been to the Slowdown since my first trip to Omaha, before I turned 21. We showed up to bask in the Saddle Creek-iness of the place, and made the bartender make us coffee in the middle of the afternoon, since we couldn't buy beer. The place has been remodeled and expanded since then. They have a whole new side of the room with a full-size stage, now, including a split-level area and a balcony from which you can take in the show. It's t...

Klara I found out about two days in advance that First Aid Kit were playing in town, and grabbed some secondhand tickets for probably way too much money. I had missed them on their last pass through town, in June, because I was busy with the frog season -- and I really regretted it. I wasn't about to miss out again, and I hadn't caught a FAK show since they opened for Bright Eyes in Dallas on the People's Key tour. Johanna Samantha Crain opened. She's a singer-songwriter from Oklahoma who I had seen play in Norman, sometimes with John Calvin. I enjoyed her set -- and her Oklahoma stories. It felt almost like being back home, except there was still no good Mexican food. Alas. The thing that always strikes me about Samantha Crain is that she has tiny hands for such a good guitarist. I had been living under a rock, I guess, because I didn't realize First Aid Kit's "new" album had been out for about five months. As a result, I got to hear mos...

July Talk's creepy antics. The summer that I discovered the Rural Alberta advantage, I was volunteering in the herpetology department of a museum of natural history. I listened to Hometowns incessantly as I looked through buckets of preserved box turtles. Hearing their music still reminds me of the smell of ethanol and hundred-year-old snakes. It may seem remarkable that I find this pleasant, but I do. Ah, nostalgia. The RAA were here in Minneapolis last January testing out new material for their album Mended with Gold, recently out on Saddle Creek Records. They're a three piece band from (surprise) Alberta. They were on tour with another Canadian band, July Talk, whose performance was unique and surprisingly disturbing. I've never before experienced a concert in which I liked the way a band sounded but couldn't stand their stage antics. In fact, never has my overall opinion of a band been formed exclusively or even primarily by their stage antics. July Talk...