Crooked Fingers at GAMH and the Album Leaf at the Independent
This is a three concert week (well, eight days) for me. I saw the Crooked Fingers at the Great American Music Hall last Saturday and the Album Leaf at the Independent on Tuesday. It was my first time seeing both of these bands. On Saturday I’m going to see a silent movie accompanied by the American Music Club.
I’d only started listening to the Crooked Fingers after the tsunami benefit at GAMH in January where he, Jonathan Richman, Mark Kozelek and Ben Gibbard. And here was this guy who was the leader of the seminal indie rock band Archers of Loaf playing toned down americana sort of stuff. I checked out some records at the station and they were good.
It’d been a long time since I’d gone to an undersold show at GAMH. It was surprising that people weren’t packed together (and that I could sit down in the balcony).
They put on a good show. They did their songs well. There was enough energy but nothing really special. The best part of the show was during part of the encore when they took acoustic instruments (two acoustic guitars, an upright bass, a fluegelhorn, a flute, a snare and a high hat) and went right into the middle of the audience and played for everyone completely unmiced and unamplified.
According to my crappy Sidekick camera, it looked sort of like this:
The Album Leaf were good. One of the things that makes live performances different/better than the studio recording is energy. Nominally electronic music can’t really have more energy, but that is not a worry with the Album Leaf live show, as it turns out. Plenty of emotion and energy.
I guess that’s all I have to say about that.
Oh wait, I do have a little more to say. This was my first trip to the Independent. It’s layout is somewhere between the Paradise and TT the Bear’s (for the Boston music sceners out there). It’s got high ceilings but it’s a fairly small room. The crowd wasn’t giant (which I always like) and the vibe more down to earth than the usual San Francisco venues.
