I can be brief on this review:  Simply, awesome.

Also, what other band would watch the opening act get rained out, and then interrupt their own act so the first band could play a couple of songs?  I’ve never seen something like that before.

Finally, whoever thought it was a good idea to have The Flaming Lips and Sonic Youth play at the Minnesota State Fair is some kind of demented genius.  What a perfect location for this concert.

Okay, kind of quiet around here lately. I’ve been in a bit of a writing funk, and busy on top of that. This site may go into hibernation for a few months in the near future. I have a number of major projects I need to be working on right now, and this site is one of the many things keeping me from focusing the appropriate amount of time on them.

Lisa and I saw Beth Orton at First Ave last night. Aside from some annoying Ticketmaster hi jinx–they considered her earlier show “cancelled and rescheduled” instead of “postponed,” which essentially means they got to double up on the processing fees–it was a lot of fun. Neither of us had been to a concert in quite some time, and Lisa actually enjoyed Orton’s performance, which was no means a given considering her lukewarm reaction to her albums. The start of the show was a bit rough–guitars out of tune, technical problems, Beth sometimes sounding like she had a cold–but it got progressively better as the show went on. The show was really heavy on her new CD, which I’m not the biggest fan of, but the songs came across a lot better live than they do on the album. We missed most of the opening band, but the little that we heard sounded pretty good, too.

Monday nights are kind of crappy nights for concerts, but you take what you can get. Driving home we decided that we need to go out to concerts more often. To some extent that will be a matter of money and time, but for the most part we’ll just have to keep a better eye on what’s coming through town.

“Even if we have kids, we still need to do stuff like this.”

“Only then it will be to shows with puppets.”

“No, I mean *real* concerts.”