Wednesday, October 31, 2007


-  Stars - Austin, TX - Stubb's  -

Well, I finally got around to seeing Stars last night, and they didn't disappoint.  The show, which also featured the Lemurs and Magnet, moved quickly and the crowd was nice.  Enjoy the review.

 
 - The Lemurs -

The Lemurs are a solid band who put on solid shows, so based on that I'm sure you can guess exactly how their set was last night.  But, they did have a fantastic moment when Michael Kingcaid of What Made Milwaukee Famous joined them on stage at the end of their set.  I don't know the name of the song, which is too bad, but it was rather inspired and a lot of fun with him involved.

- Magnet -

When this guy strolled out on stage and started clapping for himself I should have immediately realized that he might be kind of annoying.  But, I didn't.  In fact, I actually tolerated his awkwardness with the crowd for about half of his set before I really wanted him to stop playing, as his constant begging of everyone in attendance to "be his band" was taking all of the life out his work.  I don't think I've seen a more disappointing performance all year.

- Stars -

Finally!  A band that is not afraid to play songs from their best album.  I've seen so many artists this year who seem as if they're terrified to play what people have shown up to see (I'm looking at you Rilo Kiley, Interpol, etc), so they pound away with brand new material or other crap.  Not Stars though, they rarely ever strayed too far from Set Yourself On Fire and I couldn't possibly love them more for it.

As for the actual performance part, I thought it was partly unique.  The band constantly throws flowers into the crowd, which actually makes everything not smell like sweat and weed if you are somewhat close to the stage.  Amy and Torquil sound as good as you would hope that they would.  But they do have kind of a strange way of interacting with each other on stage.  Torquil sings to Amy a lot, but she tends to ignore him and just stare straight into the crowd.  Though, after an hour or so of sipping champagne she seemed to loosen up and become more playful, which would probably be the case with me as well if I had to jump up in front of a ton of people.

In any case, just go see them if you never have.  They're consummate professionals who just want you to have a good time that's worth remembering.  It's hard to ask for more than that.

- John Laird -



Unless otherwise expressly stated, all text in this blog and any related pages, including the blog's archives, is licensed by John Laird under a Creative Commons License.