the wrens. black cat. 2/11/05. this is going to be long and pointless, so you've been warned.

we started off the night by meeting my brother and his friend zach at dc9 and getting a couple of drinks. they were duly impressed by the bar and i once again felt like Hip Older Sister instead of Irrelevant 25 Year-Old Who is So Out of The Loop. by the time we got over to the black cat, around 10:15 or so, the line stretched down the block and we heard that the show had already sold out.

we got inside in time to hear three or four songs from a brooklyn band called the upwelling (who carl had been pimping), and they were surprisingly pleasant. a little U2ish, a little bombastic, not incredibly catchy and powerful but nice for a first opener. a LOT of screaming fangirls. apparently they are heartthrobbish. (and my brother liked their music enough to buy their cd). the second opener was local group army of me, by whom i was also pleasantly surprised. they had three or four distinctly good songs that came off as kind of interpolish. the rest of their stuff more or less blended together for me, but they at least had a charismatic lead singer, so it wasn't a totally boring performance. but they played way too long, at least ten songs, which came off to me as due to arrogance and an overestimation of how much the crowd was enjoying their show. you weren't that awesome, buddies.

around midnight the wrens finally came on. to be honest, i had no idea what to expect from their live performance. on one hand, i was kind of prepping myself to be disappointed, because they are like 50 years old, and maybe they would be geriatric, and sitting in wheelchairs, and playing guitars with their dentures or something. i also tried to lower my expectations because i just love the meadowlands to death, and i figured there was no way a live rendering of those songs could please me. on the other hand, i had heard good things about their concerts, and as tommy pointed out, they have been together for like 15 years, and a band who's been in existence that long probably can play pretty tight.

but overall, my reaction to the show was somewhere in between ecstasy and indifference. the concert started off really promising, with the guitarist and bassist noodling around, tweaking some knobs and making all sorts of crazy spacey sounds; it sounded more like the start of a radiohead show than anything i had heard from the wrens before. but it eventually built up into an amazing version of "this boy's exhausted", with bassist and one of the vocalists kevin whalen leaping around up on amps and screaming like he was 16 again. really, i was amazed at the level of energy throughout the entire show. i couldn't tell if it was sincere or not - like, were they just rocking this hard just to prove that they are not old fuddy duddies, or did they really feel it? did i care? not really. it was fun to watch.

the first half of the set was generally pretty exhilarating. if you've never listened to the wrens before, they have this way with a lot of their songs where they start off totally quiet and intense and restrained and build up into pure pop rock awesomeness and all of a sudden you're jumping up and down and screaming along and have just slammed the person next to you with an elbow to the face. those parts of the concert were just a lot of pure joy, which is interesting because the lyrics of all these songs are so fucking depressing. but you could tell the band was really feeling it - i definitely got the sense that they were just awed that they were playing a sold-out show, maybe grateful. anyway, during the first half of the peformance, i was about to explode out of my head with joy and music love and everything good and pure in the universe. it was lovely.

unfortunately, the later part of the show sucked donkey balls, due both to the band's performance and several factors beyond their control. these external circumstances included, surprise surprise, the SHITZEN sound at the black cat. everything was fuzzy, vocals were muddled, blah blah blah. who the fuck is running the sound there? let's kill him?

the crowd also played a part in affecting the show negatively. like i said, the show was sold out and packed. i like to think this is due to the fact that i pushed it so hard on DCist and DCist is such a bastion of TOTAL HIPNESS and trendsetting that everybody read about the band and became my army of music clones and decided to come out. hmm. probably not. however, the washington post's express had written a piece on the band on thursday, thus most likely ensuring the total awfulness of the crowd. gah. several thousand exurban yuppies probably read about the band on their metro commute, decided it would be cool to check out the show, and naturally, when they got there, couldn't be bothered to play a lick of attention to the actual music because they'd never once listened to a wrens' record and didn't in fact care about watching the performance. this resulted in so much crowd chatter over the softer parts of the wrens' songs that you often couldn't even hear the vocals. several times, you actually had people throughout the crowd yelling at everyone to shut up. normally i would find this nannyish and annoying, but really - if you're going to come to a show and not even fake listening to the band, go the fuck downstairs to the red room and leave the fans alone, assholes. so this was a rare instance in which i think the concert would have been much better if there were about half the people there, because then you know they were just coming out because they really like and know the band.

however. the wrens themselves honestly had a lot to do with the fact that the show lost all momentum come the second half. their setlist seemed off, they were playing around a lot with feedback and knob-twiddling instead of the insane rocking that i expected, they took way too much time in between songs, and really, i just got the feeling that they were being utterly self-indulgent. i suppose i can't blame them too much for that - it's not that often that you achieve indie god status only after 15 years of being together and going through label hell - but still, you owe it to the fans to play straight up music and not fuck around too much with lame reinterpretations and weird vocal stylings.

ah well. even though the show wasn't as mind-blowing as i had hoped, it still felt nice to see the wrens up there having a great time and playing to a full house, because god knows that if any band deserves it, they do. i just hope that next time i see them, they're more concerned about pleasing the audience instead of themselves.