Empires at SubT, 10/20/11

We arrived in time to catch the second half or so of Colour Revolt's set. This was not a good decision. Colour Revolt is a lot of very loud noise. They really like their reverb at the end of songs. Lucky for me, this was the second show in a row where I remembered to bring earplugs. Unlucky for me, Colour Revolt still sounds like a bunch of noise even with earplugs.

Let me pause to describe the venue. After they check IDs and the will call list, they slap a wristband on you and send you up the stairs to the venue proper. It's about a third as wide as it is long, with the stage at one end and the bar at the other. There's another staircase to the U-shaped upstairs. There's a second bar, merch, and a railing around the inside of the U where you can lean and look down. There's a wooden sculpture above the stage that you can't see during the show because it's too dark. There's a spiral staircase that comes down from upstairs onto the stage.

When it was time for Empires, siryn99 led the way into the crowd so we could get closer. We ended up about seven rows back, slightly to the right side of the venue where all the other short people were. It was an interesting height division. I could barely see Ryan, and I didn't know the bassist, so I wasn't paying much attention to him. They are Sirs Not Otherwise Appearing In This Entry. Tom looked better than I've ever seen him. His hair was still messy, but more like he slept on it than like an unkempt werewolf. Sean started the show in a leather jacket, but eventually stripped to his black Henley. The rest of our group was not thrilled with Sean's dance moves. The literal choreography is pretty ridiculous - and I couldn't see what his hips/legs were doing from my vantage point - but I thought he was better than he was when I saw him in May, and yet I wasn't quite was willing to follow him off into his cult. There is a possibility that both of these are opinions brought on by seeing him from a slightly larger distance. What I really liked were his interactions with the crowd. The stage has a block with monitors on it in front of it, and Sean kept stepping down onto it. He came all the way down into the crowd to start "Hello Lover," and then kept pointing up into the balcony. He came down again for "I Want Blood," and that time he came so far into the crowd that he stopped right in front of us.

I'm not sure if it was them or me, but it took two songs through - "Bang" and "Damn Things Over" - for me to get into the show. Then, though, I was hooked, at least partially because they played a lot of my favorite songs (this is out of order, but will give you the idea): "Hello Lover," "The Night Is Young" (which they started out soft), "Voodooized," "Spit the Dark," "Hell's Heroes" (which also had an amazing opening), "Hard Times," "Shame."

Tom looked happier and more into it than I've ever seen him. Sean sang a whole round of "Does anybody else know / does anybody else know / does anybody else know you like I do?" to him. On the other side of the stage, Sean went over to sing to Max a few times - including a block of "b-b-b-baby" - and every time, Max tossed his hair out of his face and just beamed at him. Where is the Sean/Max fic? Or even the Tom/Sean/Max fic?

The Sounds at The Vic, 10/22/11

lakeeffectgirl's summary of this show was, "Saw The Sounds last night, and Maja showed everyone her underwear." This is a good summary. Another good way to get the sense of this show is to know that what convinced lakeeffectgirl and I to go was schuyler's insistence that "you can't be a proper lesbian if you haven't seen Maja's thighs in person."

Now, there are people other than Maja in the band. Four of them, to be precise, all Swedish boys, and if The Sounds were a band anyone cared about in a fannish way, there would be a lot of fic about them. Really, though, Maja is the star of the show. For this show, and for many other shows, going by a quick Google Image search, Maja looked like an immodest 40s chanteuse: hair pulled into a chignon with feathers at the top of it, high heels, and a sparkly, knee-length dress with armholes wide enough that we could see her bra and a slit all the way up the front. Because the cut of the dress wasn't good enough, she kept pulling her skirt up, just to make sure we got a good view of her legs and underwear. She also did high kicks. Her thighs, which are basically the fifth and sixth members of the band, are amazing, but I have to say I found her attractive the way I sometimes find men attractive: I understand it intellectually, but she's not really my type.

The audience for the show was interesting. I'm usually completely out of place at shows because I'm (a) too old and (b) not cool enough. This show had a more varied audience where I didn't feel quite so much like the odd one out. The audience was also at least half men. My companions said they'd never seen that many men at a Sounds show before. My favorite was the man with the shaved head in the second row from the stage who was at least a head taller than everyone around him and kept throwing up the horns. Our other favorite people were the person with the cardboard sign that said, "MARRY ME MAJA," and the person who brought Maja a Swedish flag, which she wore as a scarf and signed before returning. At one point, Maja took a sip of a drink offered to her from the audience. My only thought was: "That would be a good way to get DNA from a rock star who won't submit to a paternity test." It's possible that I've watched too many crime shows.

I don't know what else to say about this show. Maja was very high energy. They played the one Sounds song I know ("Something to Die For"). I had a moment where I had to stop moving and breathe very deeply because I thought I might pass out. At the time, I attributed it to the smoke effects, but since I came home and got sick, maybe that was just the beginning of that. We called the venue for set times so we could skip the openers and only saw part of Kids at the Bar's DJ set between acts. I know nothing about DJs and have no opinions on the set, but I liked the energy of one of the guys.