My friends paid $50 a piece for their tickets from some super sketchy scalper dude from Craigslist. The show was not worth that much money. I paid $20 (plus fucking service charges). The show was maybe worth that much money.
Really, all three acts displayed different and varying degrees of fakeness, with varying degrees of success.
The Beautiful Bodies from KC played first. Their success with the audience (people fucking loved them) hinged entirely upon their frontwoman’s sex appeal. I mean, yeah, she is pretty attractive I guess — I’ve seen the girl around tons of times before, but I couldn’t tell you where. But, c’mon, she kept on zipping and unzipping this skimpy leather thing and she was sporting some serious sideboobs — I think every female in the theater developed a serious girl-crush on her. As far as their music, it is really pretty generic, and basically sounds like a Yeah Yeah Yeahs tribute band. It just seemed kind of silly for them to be opening for a band without which they would probably not even exist. Whatevz, it is cool that they were able to open for a band that they clearly love, and they didn’t pretend to be a big deal or anything.
As for the Ssion, meh, I really haven’t ever liked them too much, and this wasn’t an exception. It’s basically that Ashley Miller dude playing mediocre dance music while some hipsters entertain themselves with nonsensical performance art. Don’t get me wrong, performance art can be rad if done right, but I don’t think these guys have much to say beyond vague feminism and bad attempts at homosexual shock value. Nothing really serves any purpose or says anything at all. They are basically the personification of “hipster bullshit.”
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs certainly delivered a confident and sharp set, but unfortunately it never quite felt honest. I tend to favor musicians just being themselves and connecting musically on an honest level over contrived, theatrical stage personas. I mean, they rocked hard and I had a great time dancing around to some solid jams, but they don’t really have the arty edge that I’m sure they did at their early New York shows. Oh well. They started with the first three songs from the pretty solid new Is Is EP, which consists of songs written between their debut and Show Your Bones, and then a new song which they had never played before, I guess, which was pretty cool. Highlights after that were “Maps,” which is still a pretty rockin’ pop song, “Phenomena,” which is probably their best song just because it is so fucking sassy and grooved out, and “Black Tongue,” which is just snotty as fuck and scathing. And some of Karen O’s fakeness was kind of cool sometimes — she kept taking this hat with streamers and this mask on and off for different songs, and holding this cool industrial green light with her microphone, which looked kind of neat. And Zinner consistently looked like a badass, and played pretty hard. Everybody was rocking out, sometimes too much — there were the usual dumb kids who were all like, “DUDE MOSH PIT” and pushing people around, even during mellow songs. But what can you do. I had fun. It was worth $20 (plus fucking service charges), I guess.
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