I went to church on Thursday

By the time I got downtown, the lines were terrible at every venue. I met Gus at the Canadian Blast party which had free food. We caught the beginning of Sam Roberts before taking off. We ended up at the French Legation Museum, which I have already gushed over on this blog.

We saw Camera Obscura, Pete & the Pirates, the Thermals, and Cursive. Overall it was a great set. The big surprise was Pete & the Pirates who were much better than we expected. Maybe if they actually posted an MP3 on the SXSW website, I would have had them on my must see list. Oh well, they're fault. Promotion is the key to a successful SXSW, if you can't handle sending SXSW a single MP3, you fail.

I then headed to the church. Actually, I need to be more specific because there were two church venues. I went to the Central Presbyterian Church to check out the Rural Alberta Advantage and Grizzly Bear (hereby known in this post as Grizzlebee, an homage to the fictional family restaurant in Sealab 2021). The church really annoyed me. You had to sit in the pews. If anyone was standing or sitting in the aisle, someone came out and claimed that the show legally couldn't start until everyone was sitting and the aisles were clear. There was no bar, only bottled water (at least it was only $1 and the people selling it were ridiculously nice, even refusing a tip). You even had to leave the venue to use the bathroom. Luckily, the amazing acoustics made up for most of the problems (except the no beer thing, that's just unforgivable at SXSW).


The venue was already running over 15 minutes behind when I got there. That's just inexcusable. The first band, Girls, was still on and they were running behind. How does that even happen? Do you wait until the scheduled start time to do a sound check? Did Girls show up late because they had a craving for Roppolo's Pizza? Were you drawn by the '80's music being blasted from the Roppolo's trailer in a shameless attempt to copy the style of Hoeks? No one may ever know the truth. And no one really cares.

The Rural Alberta Advantage put on a great show, but I'm planning a full post on that later.

After that, Grizzlebee came out and bored the last bit of buzz I had left. I mean, they're really good at their style of music. Unfortunately, they're style is "painfully boring". I know that a lot of people like them, but they're music is not for me. I know I'm not the only one either, because a large number of people waked out at the same time as me, about halfway through their set.

Funny side note about that set: I ran into my wife's friend Carter a few days later who told me he was also at the show. I mentioned that one of the members of the Rural Alberta Advantage was a friend of my Canadian coworker. Carter seemed relieved to hear that. He said that the band Girls had no girls in it, and Grizzlebee obviously didn't include any grizzly bears, so it was nice that one of the bands had a name that truly fit since the members really are from rural Alberta.

After the church I met Gus at the Parish for Thao and the Get Down, Stay Down. My one word review would have to be "eh." Gus claimed that her voice is what's so great about her music and that just doesn't come through when she plays live. That makes sense.

Next I headed to Stubb's for Andrew Bird, who was amazing. The guy is just so talented and he really knows how to put on a great show. The only problem is that his digital loop pedals kept making a loud pop every time he turned them on. I mean, the guy has been touring for a few months now, you'd think that they would have worked out the kinks by now. Oh well.


From there I headed to Emo's, which had a pretty good line. Gus was already at the front of the line and he tried to convince me to join him, thus cutting the line. After being so mad at people all weekend for cutting, I just didn't feel right about it. When you do something wrong, you're no longer allowed to bitch about other people doing it, that's just how I roll. It cost me about 15 minutes, but that's OK because the Passion Pit's lead singer has a really unique voice, but it gets really old after a few songs. Having to hear their whole set would have been torture.

This happened. I actually saw the guy at the Silversup Pickups show on Saturday, so yeah, he's got pretty good taste in music. Both times, he was being slobbered on by a bunch of random people. I was never one of those people. I swear. You can't prove anything.

We finished the night with Peter, Bjorn, and John. So, they're supposed to be some sort of super group, right? But every time Bjorn played bass, he played, at most, two different notes, but normally just one. I guess simplicity is just they're style, but it does get a little boring. It was a little crazy when they ended without whistling. But then they played an encore. It was totally obvious that they were sick of playing "Young Folks" but they totally understood that everyone there was waiting for it.

The end.