eat my wrath, gorilla throwing barrels!

as noted below, last week sunday (not yesterday, last week), i went to see the shins play at the showbox. i was very excited, as i had never seen them live and i love them with all of the good places of my heart. this is not always the best mindset with which to approach a live show because research has shown that for at least 70 percent of music groups, album quality is inversely proportional to performance quality. for instance: the minus five, built to spill, spoon, the walkmen--so awesome on disc, so crappy live; and coheed & cambria, sparklehorse, grandaddy, sushirobo--so crappy on disc, so awesome live. clearly, some bands suck or rock both ways like wilco, andrew wk, neutral milk hotel, bright eyes and modest mouse. i'll leave it up to you which ones suck and which ones rock and keep in mind, there are no right answers. just cool ones and dumb ones.

my point is, i went into the shins show thinking, oh holy shit, this is going to be awesome, which is always a bad idea when the statistics really aren't in your favor. luckily for me, the statistics were twainian and the shins were fucking awesome live, oh holy shit. they are one of few bands that actually sound, you know...like the album when they play. i mean, exactly like the album. which, i suppose, could be a negative thing to some people, but not to me. they played for like an hour-forty-five, which was extra cool since they only have two really short albums, so they literally played EVERY song on both albums, so no one went away disappointed that the band didn't play his/her favorite track like when i went to see bright eyes the second time and the fuckers didn't play "make war." also, the dudes in the shins look like everybody's next door neighbor--geeky everymen in baggy tee-shirts with bad hair. plus, they were kinda tipsy and funny when when a girl threw a bra onstage with her name and number, they had no idea what it was. the keyboardist was like "dude...is this...is this a bra? somebody threw a bra up here! whoa! and it's got a phone number on it...this is AWESOME!" i was pissed that somebody beat me to the bra trick because *i* wanted to make out with him.

the best part was when, during the encore, someone shouted that they should cover a postal service song and the keyboardist was all, "yeah, hold on a second and i'll press 'demo' on my keyboard." HAH-HAH...in your face, postal service!