As you can already tell by the title of this post, we ended up going to the Cold War Kids show at Neumo's. As it turns out, the TV on the Radio/Grizzly Bear show sold out sometime in between the time we left Bellingham and got to Seattle. Our initial disappointment was short-lived, however, and we ended up having an awesome night. As you may or may not already know, the Cold War Kids were supposed to be touring the U.S. in support of The Futureheads. As fate would have it, they canceled at the last minute leaving the CWK as headliners of a national tour (their first one). This proved to work in our favor for 3 reasons: 1) I don't really like the Futureheads all that much, 2) the ticket price was lower ($10 instead of $15), and 3) the audience was actually there to see CWK play a headlining set.
We arrived at the venue about an hour early since we had nothing to do in Seattle after we discovered the TVOTR show was sold out, and we were literally the second group to walk into Neumo's. After about an hour of walking around the empty room watching the first band soundcheck, it was 9:00 and time for the show to start. At this point it looked like my hypothesis from the last post was holding up, everyone that may have been interested in seeing CWK was probably at TVOTR. When the opener 'S' came on there were literally 25 people in the building. After their lackluster performance, about 50-75 more people filed into Neumo's and were mostly just sitting in circles talking to one another or leaning up against the walls on the sides of the room. At about 10:00 the band Delta Spirit, ambushed the stage and came out firing on all cylinders. For about half the song it seemed like everyone was in shock (they had expected to wait through another shitty band), at which point I joked to my friend that the band sounded like 'Clap Your Hands Say Yeah' on speed. Needless to say, within about 2 songs the band had the crowd's full attention, and played a really nice set, whose pianos and overall sound would work to compliment that of Cold War Kids. The highlight of the set for me was the song, 'French Quarter' about a man who had lost everything, but was too stubborn to leave desperately calling out, "The south is in my blood!" (stream it on their myspace)
After the surprising performance by Delta Spirit the crowd was warmed up for the Cold War Kids to finally take the stage, by this time even more people had filed in and the crowd size was pretty decent. They came out with the song 'We Used to Vacation', and absolutely killed it. It seemed like the entire band was on the same page, they were all equally emotional, and the sound ended up coming out beautifully. One of the trademarks of CWK is their tendency to integrate a lot of different obtuse noise combinations into their music, this translated into their live performance, with the guitarist taking turns shaking a maraca, then pounding a cymbal set on top of a crate with it (near the end of the song he was so into it that he pounded the cymbal so many times in a row that it fell of the crate, at which point he threw the maraca down at it on the ground). In all, their set was perfectly executed, and very emotional, mixing up noise combinations from every direction. Highlights included an awesome mid-set rendition of 'St. John' (complete with hand motions from the lead singer Nathan Willett to illustrate the story), and the climatic closing song 'Hang me Out to Dry'. Awesome show, by the end of the night we were all asking ourselves TV on the who?
I highly recommend seeing this tour, for $10 it's a steal (check out dates on their myspace). Oh yeah, and get the debut full length from CWK, 'Robbers and Cowards' when it releases on 10-10 everywhere (you might notice a lot of the songs are the same on the LP as the EP, but they've all been re-recorded, so check it out.). As I mentioned earlier, I'm seeing Blue Scholars at the Viking Union on Saturday, look out for a post prepping you for that show tomorrow.
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