The Concert Friday Night
Was amazing. Mostly.
The OneUps had already started playing by the time we got through the queue room, but man did they sound good. In spite of the fact that they mostly played music from games I had somehow missed as a kid, I was still perfectly content to listen to them. They had cleared the main theater of all the chairs so that it was standing-room only, and geeks being geeks, there was a huge mass of people crowded around the stage...plus another huge mass lining the walls of the room that were all sitting on the floor playing their DSs. It was an incredible sight actually, to look around and see so many faces bathed in the white glow of their handheld's screen, totally enjoying the live music while they played their favorite games and chatted on PictoChat. This whole trip can be characterized as me getting hit by things, because I was once again struck at how unusual this type of behavior was for a concert, but how right it felt anyway. I wish I had anticipated this better, because I had (quite foolishly) determined that there was no need to bring my DS with me to a concert.There was actually a second reason I ended up wishing I had had it, and that's the Freezepops. Now, I like to consider myself a mild fan of electronic music. I go from the pretty mainstream end of things with Moby, through Blueman Group right up to Daft Punk. (Please don't criticize me for thinking is the "opposite" end of the electronica spectrum: it's what I know.) Where I start having a problem with electronic music is when it's just a synthesizer on a loop for 32 measures. The incredibly slow, 2 minute fade from ba-ba-dum, ba-ba-dum, to baaaa-dum, baaaa-dum doesn't do it for me, and neither does the "let's see how many instruments we can bang on all at the same time" kind of noise. While quite a few people at the concert seemed to appreciate this type of music, it pretty much just made my head hurt. Jenn and Pat sympathized, and we went outside into the lobby to wait for them to finish their set.
We stuck around though, because Pat and I both really wanted to see Jonathan Coultan perform. This turned out to be a wise move, because he was entertaining as hell. I may be too naive to know better than to admit this, but I actually only know of him because of the track he did for Portal called Still Alive. The rest of the audience was (once again) far better informed than I and was able to sing along to pretty much every track he played.
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