Alkaline Trio

A while back on Facebook, I had a conversation going about what bands/performers people would want to see in concert - their top 5. Interestingly enough, Sean and I had Alkaline Trio on our lists and well, they came in concert last night so we went! It was at "In the Venue" in Salt Lake City. Two bands opened for them - The Dear & Departed, whose lead singer MAY have been from New Zealand, or maybe South Africa, he had an odd accent for sure. But they were decent, I didn't mind listening to them for 45 minutes or so. Then Cursive played, and they were just ok, but they did have a couple of balding, middle-aged, chubby guys playing bass and guitar, so they made me feel a little more at home with this young crowd :-D

Alkaline Trio played a pretty good set. They had a couple of brand new songs that I hadn't heard before, but they also played quite a bit of their older stuff that I really like. This band is kind of unique in that they have two singers - I know some other bands do this as well, but it's definitely an exception, not the rule. Well, the singer who also plays bass lost his voice about 3 songs into his contribution to the performance so the remaining songs he tried to sing were pretty rough. For some reason their mics were way low too, so you couldn't really hear him very well anyway. So, that kind of stunk but for the most part the show was pretty good. There was a pretty funny "fight" with some really nerdy looking kids, during one of the set-up intermissions, and Sean and I were entertained by that for a few minutes. Also, another entertaining little tid-bit, when the kids would crowd surf, there was this security guy who would grab them and take them out of the crowd. I've seen this at many concerts, when people need to get out of the mosh-pit, or a very crowded area because they can't breathe, or something. Well, one guy kept doing it, he must have crowd-surfed and been snagged and dragged out like 3-4 times. It was pretty funny, I think he might have been messing with the security guys. I mean the space in this venue is pretty small, so it's not like he couldn't just walk out of the congested area pretty easily.

Anyway, we enjoyed the show, had a good time and look forward to the next concert. I think Sean had Ray Charles on his list, which will be hard to accomplish. I'm trying to get to 311 again, and I'm sure there will be others this year. :-)