i went to another concert organized by seattle’s alternative station, 107.7 the end. the deck the hall ball is an annual event much like endfest, this year it featured 6 of the hottest indie bands right now: snow patrol, keane, the shins, the killers, franz ferdinand and modest mouse.

it’s pretty difficult to fit all six bands into one night considering they are all well known so their sets had to be of a decent length. nevertheless, the organizers tried to fit them in so the concert started at 6pm with doors opening at 4:30! don’t people have to work?? we had to leave work right at 5pm to head down to key arena.

i haven’t talked a lot about seattle traffic, mainly because i’ve tried my best to avoid driving in it by either taking the bus or just not driving during rush hour. well i couldn’t avoid it this time because i was pretty sure that the concert would go late and the buses wouldn’t be running then. so we drove down and a route that would normally have taken twenty minutes took almost two and a half hours! so we missed snow patrol and i ended up missing keane again….

actually that’s not true, we got in the doors just as they played this is the last time (my favest keane song) and watched them finish with bedshaped. not an entire loss, but i wish i was there earlier so i could get into the set. after that we moved up a bit in the pit and the shins came on. now my roommates are big, big fans of the shins but i can’t really get into them. i think their music is a little too mellow for my tastes. some of the crowd thought as i did but there were also some die hards out there so they got a decent response from the crowd.

i should say that they packed a huge number of people into this concert. key arena is the home to the thunderbirds and the supersonics, so it’s decently sized. they pretty much filled 2/3rds of the seats and the entire floor was packed with people. we moved up again after the shins and were pretty much as close as we could get since we couldn’t move thru the wall to wall people in front of us. unfortunately we were probably still 50 rows of sweaty people back from the stage.

anyways, the killers were next, and they were the ones who i really wanted to see (saw franz already and missed keane). here’s their setlist from my shoddy memory: jenny was a friend of mine, smile like you mean it, somebody tell me, andy you’re a star, indie rock & roll (never heard this before), mr. brightside, all the things that i’ve done. i had heard rumors that they were bad live but ian saw them a couple of days ago and said they were not bad. i think i would agree with that. they were “not bad” but they weren’t superfantastic (as franz would put it later, but did they mean suberfantacularizzle?), they seemed to have some technical problems as a couple of their songs were slower than normal. all in all, not a bad show.

after that, we went to grab some food. i wasn’t too excited to see franz ferdinand since i saw them recently and they haven’t released any new stuff (well they had that re-issue of the debut with b-sides but…). in fact we even got out of the pit and sat in seats at the far end of the stadium like old people. anyways here’s what the played: michael, tell her tonight, take me out, auf achse, i’m a villian (new song), jacqueline, matinee, 40′, darts of pleasure, this fire (i think that’s right, it was a long night). i thought they were better than the killers even though i had seen this stuff before, and they were probably the best set of the night.

after that it was modest mouse whom i’ve tried to listen to their cds but really can’t get into them. i find the lead singer’s voice annoying too. anyways, they went on and people started leaving. they played some more and more people started leaving. throughout the set i pretty much reaffirmed my opinion of them, i can’t get into their music! anyways, it was an interesting set aside from the people leaving; they had two drum kits and usually two people playing them (at one point there was one guy playing both), there were 2 minute pauses between each song which undoubtedly got more people to walk out, and a sasquatch (sonics mascot?) jumped onto the stage and jammed with them. anyways, i wouldn’t have mind if we left early.

anyways, something else interesting was that there was a no moshing rule and we saw probably 50 people get kicked out for that. it was weird because we saw people getting kicked out when we just arrived and until the very end. you would think that once you saw people getting kicked out that you wouldn’t mosh since you would miss all the good bands, but that didn’t stop the kids. i’m not sure why people were moshing during modest mouse tho, it’s not really moshing material…

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: concerts, seattle