I won tickets to Thee Oh Sees through the wonderful Radio 1190. I am familiar with them, but never owned an album or anything. Later that day Carleigh won tickets through the event organizer or something. So Jack, Carleigh, Liz and I left for the show pretty early. I guess way earlier then I realized since we were some of the first people to arrive. It allowed us get some really nice seats on the balcony at least. The first band was Dirty Few. They sang about drinking, spit into each others mouths, tried to ride a skateboard on the stage and appeared to have a blast. We enjoyed it for what it was, but I could go for less spitting.

The next band was Rubedo and they started their set by saying “Hello we are Rubedo and we’re going to rock your socks off!” They didn’t. I guess now that it’s been a couple days I can at least acknowledge that they were interesting. The drummer was fun to watch. The singer would go in between seizures and motivational speaker poses. He even got up on the speaker and spewed meaningless new age crap. He unfortunately didn’t jump. Their music was what you would expect for a band who claims “Rubedo is the physical manifestation of sound streaming from the psyche of its members. This is the alchemy of rock and roll.” Except worse. Fuzz, Rob and Leslie had luckily arrived in time to see this band with us.

It’s amazing how quickly you can tell when a band is good, because it took about 3 seconds for Thee Oh Sees to establish how awesome they are. Straight forward intense shredding for two hours. Toe Cutter and The Dream are a couple of the songs I knew and they were played well. The crowd was super into it. The dueling drummers were really fun to watch. When it was over my ears were ringing and they had gained a new fan. What a great band to see live.

The MURDER CITY DEVILS!

A photo posted by Null Skateboards (@null_skateboards) on Nov 11, 2014 at 10:05pm PST

I never saw Murder City Devils back in the day. I had tickets to see them open for At The Drive-In, but being the Texans that ATDI are they rolled their van in the snow and the show was cancelled (well I later found out that MCD still played, but at a different venue). So here we are several years later with a chance to see them. They just put out a new album that I think is great. So it’s kind of funny to be excited to hear the older classic songs I’ve never heard and want to hear the new songs as well.

Zach and I braved the cold and got there early enough to see the opening band Dragondeer. They play some breed of blues music. They had talent and played well, but it didn’t really hype us up or anything.

Several more friends showed shortly before 10 when MCD went on. They opened with the new tune “I Don’t Want To Work For Scum Anymore”. It was loud quickly and Spencer walked right off the stage into the crowd screaming the lyrics. It was an intense and awesome way to start the set. He stayed on the stage for the rest of the show which was a good mixture of old tunes with a few new ones sprinkled in. The setlist was pretty similar to this one I found on the web except they closed with Murder City Riot. Which is kind of funny because the lyrics repeatedly sayd “been up drinking all night” and yet the show was over at 11pm. I for one was grateful though and it seemed like a lot of the older crowd was as well. It was a great show. It was nice seeing a band still doing it. Still making great music, still touring, looking healthy (it’s funny getting older and wanting to see bands look healthy rather then wasted like when you saw them at 20 something) and doing things right. Kudos MCD, you guys rule.