Good Weather For Airstrikes

First of all, let me apologize for the slight dropoff in updates over the last week, I’ve been having a lot of computer/internet problems and whatnot, but that looks to be all cleared up now, so everyone can breathe a deep sigh of relief. Anyway, I saw Bright Eyes w/ Feist and The Magic Numbers last Friday, so below is the recap of that.Amazing. Friday night I saw Bright Eyes for the third (!) time this year, only unlike the previous two shows (on January 29th with CocoRosie and Tilly & The Wall, and on April 14th with The Faint) which occurred at the wonderful 9:30 Club, this show took place at the significantly larger and less awesome Constitution Hall. And also unlike the two previous tours, which supported I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning (January) and Digital Ash In A Digital Urn (April), this one was to be a best of show, spanning the entire career and catalogue of Mr. Oberst.Due to some driving/navigating issues that caused us to get hopelessly lost and barely make it to the venue at all, we missed The Magic Numbers, though I wasn’t too upset as I have their debut album and I’m not such a huge fan. However, we did arrive just in time for Feist (thankfully), who turned in a solid, though unspectacular set. However, one of the highlights of the entire show was during “Mushaboom”, my favorite song and the one my ex-girlfriend used to introduce me to Feist with. At the beginning of the song the lovely Leslie Feist said she’d like to bring some friends out to help her, and not only did Oberst come out to help out on lead vocals, but he was accompanied by the one, the only, the flawless/beautiful/stunning JENNY LEWIS. Oberst (remember: the new Bright Eyes live album - Motion Sickness, released last Tuesday - includes a cover of “Mushaboom”) and Feist took turns alternating on the lead vocals, while Jenny and Feist sang the “oh-oh-oh” chorus. All in all it sounded amazing, and due to the worst luck ever, neither me nor the four girls I was with had a camera. Feist turned in a solid set, despite the surprising exclusion of her two other singles from the setlist (”One Evening” and “Inside and Out”), hurt by her seemingly never-ending lame inter-song ranting/”banter”, but I ended up getting a cool shirt anyway (they were all sold out of Bright Eyes shirts in my size - adult large… too much to ask? - by the time we got to the venue… lame).

“Mushaboom” - Feist [highly recommended]
“Mushaboom” (Live) - Bright Eyes

Onto the main event… Though the April show was more enjoyable as a whole (The Faint actually ended up stealing the show, and Bright Eyes’ set was merely solid), this was the single best Bright Eyes performance I’d seen. First of all, Oberst was surprisingly sober (read: not shitfaced as he was at the previos two gigs), and he was even downright playful with the audience. All the songs sounded much better than on record, as is usually the case at Oberst’s shows, and the subtle changes he’s known for live were all there. Probably the most noticeable was in “The Calendar Hung Itself” (the highlight of the show for me, not including the encore) when he changed the lyric to “Does he know that place below your belt that’s your favorite to be touched?” from what was previously “below your neck”… which was awesome. Oberst played even less from his two newest releases (I’m Wide Awake and Digital Ash) than I had expected, playing only four songs from those two releases combined, and even more surprising was his exclusion of all of the new albums’ singles, save for “Lua”. He did play an awesome acoustic version of “Hit The Switch” which was fantastic, and another highlight came during “False Advertising” which Oberst prefaced saying, “this next song’s a bit of a waltz, so feel free to dance”. This resulted in probably a hundred people pouring into the aisles and waltzing to Oberst’s brand of emo-tinged suicide folk-rock. Other pre-encore highlights included the beautiful/amazing harp intro that turned into the opening chords of “Sunrise, Sunset” (his standard opener on the tour), throwback jam “Falling Out of Love” (a song Oberst wrote and recorded at age 15), and the always-wonderful “Old Soul Song (For The New World Order).

The encore was probably the best I’ve ever seen performed by any band though. Oberst returned to the stage solo, and the told the audience that he was gonna play a song he hadn’t yet played on this tour, and to forgive him if he forgot some of the words because he hadn’t practiced it in a while. He went on to explain that he felt the need to play it, considering the fact that the President “sleeps across the street”, before launching into the incendiary “When The President Talks To God” which was even more amazing than when he performed it last January. Oberst kept things fresh by adding “though not that high” immediately after the “but the approval rating’s high” line. He also added a lyrical rant to the end of the song, screaming “We’re coming down the mountain now, we’re coming down the mountain now motherfucker!!”, which was, suffice it to say, AWESOME. Next came an incredible rendition of “Gold Mine Gutted” which I enjoyed immensely more than the album version, which I wasn’t a terribly huge fan of, before Oberst asked for a god damn tympany roll and capped things off with the masterpiece that is “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves”. Oberst told everyone in the audience to stand up and sing along (something he’s not know for), before ripping through “Shit Ourselves”, which lasted nearly ten minutes and was everything I had hoped for it to be and more. Below is the setlist, and you can download the songs that were the highlights of the show, as well as all of Bright Eyes videos, below.

Setlist:
Sunrise, Sunset
You Will? You. Will?…
The Calendar Hung Itself
Arienette
False Advertising
Napoleon’s Hat
Nothing Gets Crossed Out
Falling Out Of Love At This Volume
Hit The Switch
Old Soul Song (For The New World Order)
I Won’t Ever Be Happy Again
Lua

Encore
When The President Talks To God (Live in DC, 1-29-05)
Gold Mine Gutted
Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And To Be Loved) [highly recommended]

Videos:
“Mushaboom” - Feist
“Lover I Don’t Have To Love” - Bright Eyes
“Bowl of Oranges” - Bright Eyes
“At The Bottom of Everything” - Bright Eyes (most adorable plane crash ever)
“First Day of My Life” - Bright Eyes
“Easy/Lucky/Free” - Bright Eyes [highly recommended]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.