Adventures in solitude

With a busy work week coming to its conclusion, I felt like staying home rather than heading out, but in what's turned out to be a year for good rock shows, tonight meant I was off to see The New Pornographers and Okkervil River.

The concert was at the Newport Music Hall, which accommodates four times the number of people where I've seen every other show this year. If it didn't sell out, it was going to come close to it, meaning that it was going to be a sticky night. I haven't been there for almost two years--last time: Beth Orton--but I've been there enough to know that this time of year with a big crowd guarantees it will be muggy inside.

So, the challenge when going alone is to figure out what to do while standing there waiting up to an hour for the concert to start and sweating. I've found that the combination of clearing one's mind, trying to make oneself invisible, and eavesdropping works about as well as anything. Usually the conversations one overhears are banal, but you just hope that they won't carry over when the music starts. (Unfortunately, this isn't always the case.)

Okkervil River opened with an hour-long set. I've heard of them but hadn't heard anything by them before tonight. I could tell that the six-piece band deserved their positive reputation and liked what I heard, but with no familiarity with these songs, their set obviously didn't mean as much to me. You might not think that having a relationship with music makes it "better", but my sense is that I would have been more impressed if I knew a note they played.

A half hour after Okkervil River's set wrapped, seven members of The New Pornographers took the stage, including Neko Case. She doesn't always tour with them. As a fan of her solo work, I was thrilled that she was making an unexpected appearance.

I've not been as crazy about the group's most recent album Challengers in comparison to their three others, but the live setting improved the songs from it. Perhaps having the slower tunes sprinkled among the up-tempo catalog songs made them stand out better. "Adventures in Solitude" and "Mutiny, I Promise You" ranked among the night's best along with old favorites "Mass Romantic" and "The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism". Their ELO cover was great fun, and a seemingly impromptu take on Trio's "Da Da Da", which most probably know from the Volkswagen commercial, was weirdly pleasant.

Concert venues seem to have abandoned all hope of putting the pinch on photography. Signs on the entrance said no cameras were allowed, but no one was giving the shakedown or stopping pictures from being snapped. Honestly, there's really not much they can do about it with the prevalence of cameras in cell phones, and plenty of digital cameras were held up throughout the show.

I grabbed a couple quick photos and left it at that. It was the rare moment when I didn't have someone blocking my view as the headliners played. Hey dude, it's great that you're having a good time, but your side to side head shaking and larger than anyone else's personal space means I can't see much of anything but the back of your cranium. Being six feet tall, my height usually doesn't present a problem, although I have an uncanny ability for going to concerts and eventually getting behind people taller than me. Moving wasn't an option as everyone was practically stacked shoulder to shoulder.

But why moan about this when I received a good night of live music? Well, because I want to...and I was getting angrier about it the longer it went on.

Anyway, I know it seems like I've been going to concerts almost every week, but I'm all out of tickets. I'm going to try to land one for Radiohead when they go on sale in the morning. Otherwise I now return to quieter nights.