Last week my cousin, Roxy, and I drove from Denver to Austin to see Cake's New Year's Eve show. Crazy? A little. I didn't know anything about this band until Thanksgiving when Roxy asked me to go to this show with her. I'm not really in the habit of driving nearly 1000 miles to see bands I've never listened to, but I knew it would be warm in Texas so I agreed. We spent the day hanging out in downtown Austin and eating the most delicious guacamole known to man at a restaurant called Maria Maria. We headed over to Austin Music Hall around 6pm and waited for the doors to open. The line was fairly long when we arrived so both of us were surprised to find ourselves in the second row once inside. The catch-22 of standing room only situations is that you want to be up at the front for obvious reasons, but being in the front inevitably means dealing with everybody trying to edge you out for a better view and that one girl who gets WAY TOO drunk and pukes all over the place.
The first band to go on was Mariachi Texas. They played for an hour before the next opening band. I like a little Mariachi, but an hour was a bit much. The second band was
Agent Ribbons. Roxy and I liked this band best, but they were only able to play about five songs due to a long delay brought on by a broken guitar string midway through song three. After this, Mariachi Texas played for another hour. WHAT!?!? It was ridiculous. After that, the third opening band went on and played for what felt like forever. The only thing I remember about them was crazy costumes and a song entitled Sweet Banana containing a lyric similar to this: "sweet banana and salty coconuts mix in my mouth to make a delicious concoction." Yeah.
Finally around 11:30pm Cake waltzed on stage. It was right about this time when the aforementioned drunk girl had to puke. Good times. They opened with Love You Madly which was great for me because I actually remembered listening to and enjoying that one in the car the previous day. They were really good live. The singer had a cold, but still sounded just like the recorded versions (at least to an inexperienced listener such as myself). They only played about ten songs. It seemed like a bit of a rip off. The opening bands played for a total of four hours and we got roughly an hour and a half of the band we'd paid to see. And really only about forty-five minutes of that time was spent with the band actually playing. They asked a trivia question at one point and spent twenty minutes finding someone to answer. A good portion of time was also spent dividing the audience in half (like we couldn't have figured that one out on our own) and assigning portions of the choruses of a few songs for each half to sing. I like listening to bands tell stories and talk about the music, but I get irritated when so little music is actually played.
All in all it was a fun road trip. I've been to better organized shows, but at least the band was good. I don't know if I'd go see them again, but I did buy three of their songs after the concert. More importantly, I bought a lot of Agent Ribbons stuff and I really like their song Don't Touch Me. That's what I love most about concerts, there's always the opportunity to discover an unexpected gem.
-J
