Review: Modest Mouse @ Stubb's 9.17.04
getting to go to the show at all proved to be quite the daunting task, seeing as how i procrastinated (as per usual) until the day before the show when i ventured onto the great WWW to buy tickets online. i had incorrectly assumed that anyone who wanted to see modest mouse (and by the way, i'm still in denial that he has become somewhat mainstream), but anyways-----those people would just go seem him saturday at ACL, because hello!----a ticket to ACL was a ticket to cat power, my morning jacket, the old 97's (ahh high school days), and the PIXIES first ever show since they stopped touring/recording! nevertheless i was wrong, yet convinced that all things happen for a reason, so i woke up early friday (day of the show) bought a paper, grabbed a chronicle, and went in search of that reason.
well thank god modest mouse isn't mainstream enough to have tickets listed in the entertainment classifieds---i don't know what i was thinking in the first place. but i was really surprised to see that not one person had tickets listed in the chronicle. so in a last attempt at finding tickets in a paper, i ran down the street and picked up a daily texan. big fat zero.
heading back to the apartment with tears stinging my frustrated and now somewhat bleary eyes it suddenly hit me----craigslist!!! for those of you who don't know what i'm talking about, craigslist is this really really great posting board extravaganza that is super-well organized and has a really good user vibe (no shadesters here) and there is a cragslist for tons of different cities in the US and abroad. product plug to follow...
http://austin.craigslist.org/
so i find an ad that is for one ticket at forty dollars, which i thought was entirely too pricey since it was day of the show and tickets were only twenty dollars at the box office. however when i continued to scroll down the page and saw other people who wanted fifty and sixty dollars for ONE ticket (i saw one retardo who wanted eighty), well then thats when i started to get excited about "mister forty dollars." of course there was still a problem because i needed two tickets...
so i called "mister forty dollars" in hopes he still had the ticket and a steady enough income that he didn't do this for a living and might go a little lower. well he had the ticket alright, and so the bargaining commenced-----
here is a retelling of the events...
"hey i got your number off of craigslist...i was wondering if you still had that ticket to modest mouse tonight?"
(him) "i do still have that ticket."
"oh great ok----and it's forty dollars?"
(him) "yep..."
"hmmmmm how about thirty?"
(him) "how about twenty?"
"deal!!!"
(end retelling.)
so the stars shone down at me, at that moment, but there was still one more ticket to find and i still had to meet this now-mr. twenty dollars down at stubbs at 7:00 because he had paid with a credit card to get his ticket will-call. nervous at the possibilty of all that could go wrong over the course of the rest of the day, i set out to find the final ticket. i resorted myself to the fact that i was going to have to suck it up and pay top dollar, so i started emailing/dialing craigslisters into oblivion.
finally found a guy who had like 8 tickets but wouldn't go any lower than 50, but he would deliver the ticket to me on his way to ACL, so of course i agreed.
so with that ticket in my hand and ready to wave obnoxiously in catherine's face when she got home from work (she said it couldn't be done), all i had to do was wait for mr. will-call (his name is dan, by the way) to call me when he was on his way up to the ticket window so we could make our way down there to meet him and pick it up.
here is where the funny part starts....sorry you had to wait that long.
so he doesn't call and doesn't call and its getting late so i call him. (typical man) and he's like, "yeah i'm on my way there....let me call you when i get in line since you live so close." so i wait nervously, and cat is trying to convince me the whole time that its all some horrible mean trick that this guy is playing and she could be right because everything you find online is just a little bit shady in the first place.
but he finally calls back and is like, "ok i'm in line...i can't believe how long it is already!" so i asked him what he was wearing so we could find him and he says, "well i'm tall, i have dark hair, i'm wearing dark blue pants, a dark blue button-down short-sleeved shirt that says Austin Police on the back of it, and a badge-----but by the time you get down here, i'll probably be in my car so just look for that." so i tell him what cat and i have on, all the while my mind is going a million miles a minute-----IT'S A SET-UP!!! YOU'VE FINALLY BEEN CAUGHT YOU BONDED CRIMINAL!!! (even though i know this was doubtful), you never know-----the phone i had been calling could have been some special super high-tech police-issue phone that can identify me as having a warrant or something.
ahhhh amy, amy, amy......what will i be like when i'm actually at the age people start to get paranoid at? hmmmm....i guess thats where the schizophrenia part comes in.
mice? what mice?
oh yes of course----that mouse. let me get to him now, since clearly i'm not posting this entry in jail (unless i'm in a cell with martha, because you just know she can make a computer out of those prison-issued slipper-shoes).
the show was good, the company (aside from catherine) was bad. just hundreds of people who must have started drinking with their wheaties that morning. i've never seen so many cell-phones in my life. (or people trying to look emo or something with those silly truck-driver hats turned sideways.) but it was funny, because all these kids with camera phones all have them above their heads trying to snap tiny pictures of a really big stage and a very modest mouse. so he finally says, "what are you guys doing out there?-----are you trying to find your cars? (then he makes that bleep-bloop car alarms noise)
isaac and the band had a good set, though the encore is what really made the show for me. although they didn't play "custom concern", they did "doin the cockroach" for like fifteen minutes and it was unbelievable! his set mainly consisted of tracks from "good news for people who love bad news" and it was sickening to hear all these little scream and cry and sing along with "float on" and "ocean breathes salty" (which of course is his newest radio-release off of the album) ugh i still can't get over modest mouse and radio-release being in the same sentence together. but it was nice to hear a few of my favorites from the new LP...."bukowski" was awesome, "the view" and "black cadillacs" were rockin', and "blame it on the tetons" put a nice, quiet and contemplative buzz over the audience. for "the good times are killing me" which is the song on the album that the flaming lips appear on, broken social scene came out to take their place, which was really awesome but issac's vocals (at least when it came to the lyrics) were really compromised in the presence of such a big chorus, and in that song the chorus takes up a great deal of the song.
all in all it was a really good show and i'm glad i spent that much money on tickets and such, takin my favorite grrl on a really rockin date. the only thing i would change about the show (if i had been in charge) would have been not to have explosions in the sky open up for tha mouse. some of you may be shocked to read that, because yes----i do love explosions and have been listening to them for quite some time, but honestly they just weren't a good fit in the line-up. if anything they should have gone on first and then i love you but i've chosen darkness could have been the transition-to-tha mouse-band. explosions is just so um....shoegazer-ish, and of course its strange to shift from an entirely instrumental 8 to 10 minute long per song band into something as all over the place as modest mouse. maybe i'm just never satisfied but stubb's could also choose better music to play while each band sets up for their set. they played hip-hop! now don't get me wrong-----i'm just as ghetto as the next gangsta playa, but i don't know-----between the 10 minute long shoegazing ballads and the thump of jurassic 5 and mos def, it was kinda hard to stay in a modest mouse kind of place.
my hope for the future of modest mouse is this-----that they at least try to make it through one more album (since all the articles i've read state that they nearly broke up over this last one), and that they try to stay true to who they are and who their fans have been (not are now). lord knows it must be hard----i bet they miss k records now that they've got sony.
grass is always greener.
and hey, if they don't make it i've still got ugly cassanova.
well thank god modest mouse isn't mainstream enough to have tickets listed in the entertainment classifieds---i don't know what i was thinking in the first place. but i was really surprised to see that not one person had tickets listed in the chronicle. so in a last attempt at finding tickets in a paper, i ran down the street and picked up a daily texan. big fat zero.
heading back to the apartment with tears stinging my frustrated and now somewhat bleary eyes it suddenly hit me----craigslist!!! for those of you who don't know what i'm talking about, craigslist is this really really great posting board extravaganza that is super-well organized and has a really good user vibe (no shadesters here) and there is a cragslist for tons of different cities in the US and abroad. product plug to follow...
http://austin.craigslist.org/
so i find an ad that is for one ticket at forty dollars, which i thought was entirely too pricey since it was day of the show and tickets were only twenty dollars at the box office. however when i continued to scroll down the page and saw other people who wanted fifty and sixty dollars for ONE ticket (i saw one retardo who wanted eighty), well then thats when i started to get excited about "mister forty dollars." of course there was still a problem because i needed two tickets...
so i called "mister forty dollars" in hopes he still had the ticket and a steady enough income that he didn't do this for a living and might go a little lower. well he had the ticket alright, and so the bargaining commenced-----
here is a retelling of the events...
"hey i got your number off of craigslist...i was wondering if you still had that ticket to modest mouse tonight?"
(him) "i do still have that ticket."
"oh great ok----and it's forty dollars?"
(him) "yep..."
"hmmmmm how about thirty?"
(him) "how about twenty?"
"deal!!!"
(end retelling.)
so the stars shone down at me, at that moment, but there was still one more ticket to find and i still had to meet this now-mr. twenty dollars down at stubbs at 7:00 because he had paid with a credit card to get his ticket will-call. nervous at the possibilty of all that could go wrong over the course of the rest of the day, i set out to find the final ticket. i resorted myself to the fact that i was going to have to suck it up and pay top dollar, so i started emailing/dialing craigslisters into oblivion.
finally found a guy who had like 8 tickets but wouldn't go any lower than 50, but he would deliver the ticket to me on his way to ACL, so of course i agreed.
so with that ticket in my hand and ready to wave obnoxiously in catherine's face when she got home from work (she said it couldn't be done), all i had to do was wait for mr. will-call (his name is dan, by the way) to call me when he was on his way up to the ticket window so we could make our way down there to meet him and pick it up.
here is where the funny part starts....sorry you had to wait that long.
so he doesn't call and doesn't call and its getting late so i call him. (typical man) and he's like, "yeah i'm on my way there....let me call you when i get in line since you live so close." so i wait nervously, and cat is trying to convince me the whole time that its all some horrible mean trick that this guy is playing and she could be right because everything you find online is just a little bit shady in the first place.
but he finally calls back and is like, "ok i'm in line...i can't believe how long it is already!" so i asked him what he was wearing so we could find him and he says, "well i'm tall, i have dark hair, i'm wearing dark blue pants, a dark blue button-down short-sleeved shirt that says Austin Police on the back of it, and a badge-----but by the time you get down here, i'll probably be in my car so just look for that." so i tell him what cat and i have on, all the while my mind is going a million miles a minute-----IT'S A SET-UP!!! YOU'VE FINALLY BEEN CAUGHT YOU BONDED CRIMINAL!!! (even though i know this was doubtful), you never know-----the phone i had been calling could have been some special super high-tech police-issue phone that can identify me as having a warrant or something.
ahhhh amy, amy, amy......what will i be like when i'm actually at the age people start to get paranoid at? hmmmm....i guess thats where the schizophrenia part comes in.
mice? what mice?
oh yes of course----that mouse. let me get to him now, since clearly i'm not posting this entry in jail (unless i'm in a cell with martha, because you just know she can make a computer out of those prison-issued slipper-shoes).
the show was good, the company (aside from catherine) was bad. just hundreds of people who must have started drinking with their wheaties that morning. i've never seen so many cell-phones in my life. (or people trying to look emo or something with those silly truck-driver hats turned sideways.) but it was funny, because all these kids with camera phones all have them above their heads trying to snap tiny pictures of a really big stage and a very modest mouse. so he finally says, "what are you guys doing out there?-----are you trying to find your cars? (then he makes that bleep-bloop car alarms noise)
isaac and the band had a good set, though the encore is what really made the show for me. although they didn't play "custom concern", they did "doin the cockroach" for like fifteen minutes and it was unbelievable! his set mainly consisted of tracks from "good news for people who love bad news" and it was sickening to hear all these little scream and cry and sing along with "float on" and "ocean breathes salty" (which of course is his newest radio-release off of the album) ugh i still can't get over modest mouse and radio-release being in the same sentence together. but it was nice to hear a few of my favorites from the new LP...."bukowski" was awesome, "the view" and "black cadillacs" were rockin', and "blame it on the tetons" put a nice, quiet and contemplative buzz over the audience. for "the good times are killing me" which is the song on the album that the flaming lips appear on, broken social scene came out to take their place, which was really awesome but issac's vocals (at least when it came to the lyrics) were really compromised in the presence of such a big chorus, and in that song the chorus takes up a great deal of the song.
all in all it was a really good show and i'm glad i spent that much money on tickets and such, takin my favorite grrl on a really rockin date. the only thing i would change about the show (if i had been in charge) would have been not to have explosions in the sky open up for tha mouse. some of you may be shocked to read that, because yes----i do love explosions and have been listening to them for quite some time, but honestly they just weren't a good fit in the line-up. if anything they should have gone on first and then i love you but i've chosen darkness could have been the transition-to-tha mouse-band. explosions is just so um....shoegazer-ish, and of course its strange to shift from an entirely instrumental 8 to 10 minute long per song band into something as all over the place as modest mouse. maybe i'm just never satisfied but stubb's could also choose better music to play while each band sets up for their set. they played hip-hop! now don't get me wrong-----i'm just as ghetto as the next gangsta playa, but i don't know-----between the 10 minute long shoegazing ballads and the thump of jurassic 5 and mos def, it was kinda hard to stay in a modest mouse kind of place.
my hope for the future of modest mouse is this-----that they at least try to make it through one more album (since all the articles i've read state that they nearly broke up over this last one), and that they try to stay true to who they are and who their fans have been (not are now). lord knows it must be hard----i bet they miss k records now that they've got sony.
grass is always greener.
and hey, if they don't make it i've still got ugly cassanova.
posted by a. anderson at 3:56 PM
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