On October 20 I went to an Interpol show in San Francisco, and then on the 26th I went to see The Jesus and Mary Chain. The picture here is of the Interpol show and I stole it from Flickr.
I kinda don’t really like Interpol’s latest album much at all and despite having some strong songs I don’t think I’ve managed to actually listen to the whole album without switching to something else.. there’s just something about it that bugs me… I think maybe the vocals are too loud or the songs are just missing some magic dust the earlier albums had. Eeeeeenyway, the show was still pretty great. I suspected they’d play a lot of songs from Antics and that they did.. in fact I think they may have played nearly the entire album, in addition to selections from earlier albums. I think they also played some from Our Love to Admire, but honestly I don’t really recognize those songs and I only think that because there were songs in their set that I didn’t recognize and were also not raw enough to be earlier material.
The Jesus and Mary Chain had not been part of my musical listening experience up until the show, though I had of course heard of them. They’re apparently ‘new wave’ which is a musical genre I’m still trying to get a grasp on since it just simply didn’t really exist when I was in high school in North Dakota. To me The Jesus and Mary Chain sounded mostly like just good old guitar rock heavy on nice fuzzy chords… pretty much just like a cleaner version of punk rock. I guess that might explain why some friends I have known who were into new wave later got into punk rock!
So, yeah… it was a good week for live music for me!