no angels here

anyone rememeber animaniacs? good idea/bad idea?

good idea: buying last minute tickets to a concert of a band you saw before, and were decent

bad idea: buying last minute tickets to a concert of a band you saw before, and were decent, if that band is angels and airwaves

it sounded like a good idea at the time. hey you and i had seen them at not-so-silent-night. their set was short, but overall not too bad. a rock concert on a monday also scores you extra coolness points.

we expected to feel old, we knew that there would be a lot of teenagers there almost half our age. we also expected to see tom delonge in jeans so tight they looked painted on. what we didn't anticipate were all the other reasons the show sucked:

• we recognized 3 out of first 7 songs as singles from the radio. they were fine. then we waited for them to sing something good. it didn't happen before we bolted after 10 painful songs.
  
• delonge's dancing was a bad mix of smurf-like prancing, white-boy robot, and tai chi. very scary
• no chemisty among the band members. i speculated this is due to the fact they all are just delonge's employees
• when you're approaching 33, are married and have kids, you are too fucking old to be singing about your dad and bad grades. that song was probably one mark and travis vetoed 10 years ago when delonge first wrote it. it still sucks.
  
• lead singer, front-man showmanship is not telling the crowd that florida looks like a penis. its just not funny.
  
• throwing flashlights around on stage is not amusing. its not even a decent substitute to watching a club kid dancing with glow sticks
  
• stroke-inducing strobe lights doesn't make the song that repeats the phrase "i love you" 45 times any less painful
  

delonge "educated" the audience about 3/4 of the way through the show about the people who were in attendence:

1) people who know the band, and really understand what they are all about
2) people who don't really know the band, but wanted to seem them and haven't been disappointed and now like them more
3) people who tagged along, had no idea what they were in for, and but now may be a little but intrigued

hey you and i didn't belong to any of those groups. we belong to the last group -- people who hoped tom delonge would get drunk or stoned, forget what he's "now about", and lapse into all the small things. it didn't happen.

lesson of the night: when you run out of snarky things to say about the band, its time to go home. which we did.