Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

the trees and the wild

I'm so glad I didn't skip tonight's Matt Pond PA concert at the 9:30 Club.

I'm a big fan of the band's recent album, and I ordered tickets to their DC show over a month ago. But when it turned out that I'd have to go by myself (Rob was asked to be on a panel at a college media conference in New York, and another friend bowed out due to a bad sinus infection), I reconsidered whether I really wanted to go. I finally convinced myself to go solo about an hour before the band was due to take the stage.

Pond and company sounded great live, with good vocal and instrumental performances. (Side note: I love that the cellist is front-and-center onstage; her performance adds a definite richness to the music that sets it apart from other indie rock-type groups. Plus, live strings are so much better than synthesizers.)

There was a little weirdness in Pond's banter with the audience. However, I couldn't make out everything that was said, and I had trouble reading whether Pond was annoyed or just "going with it." He frequently solicited song requests from the audience, though, surprisingly, he just as frequently made a point of saying that he wouldn't play cover songs -- even though the group has recorded a number of covers (most notably "Champagne Supernova" (iTunes) for The O.C.).

I was also a little bummed that they only played one song -- albeit a good song -- for their encore. (The whole ritual of the encore is rather strange, anyway: It boosts a band's ego into the stratosphere while requiring fans to beg for music from the band they've paid money to see. And at least one encore is generally expected, anyway, so it's hardly a spontaneous show of enthusiasm and support. It's just part of the concert-going routine. But that's a rant for another day.)

In all, their performance lasted a little over an hour, and they seemed to play most of the songs on Several Hours Later (their fifth album, according to AMG), with a few earlier songs thrown in. (I'm not entirely sure what the names of those songs were, since Pond had a habit of introducing tunes by saying vaguely, "This is a song." So I'm doomed to clicking through iTunes to identify them.)