In a Hole

[ateolf]

Went to see The Jesus and Mary Chain last night. Forgive me for the rant I'm probably about to go on. The opening band was the project of their touring bass player and it was really bad, "psychedelic" pop stuff. Anyway, not much to write about either way. The main deal here is The Jesus and Mary Chain. The show definitely left me pretty disappointed. Maybe it's on me for getting my expectations up, but they definitely have some culpability in that. Okay, first I'll let it be known that, objectively, the show was mostly pretty good. They played well. They played my favorite songs from their later career and those were good. But the thing is they played for close to two hours and the only real bone they threw me was "In a Hole." That's it. I know it's not a band's responsibility to cater to me and the songs I want to hear, but they did a poor representation of Psychocandy. They had more Psychocandy shirt designs for sale than songs they played off the album. If they're going to capitalize off the legacy of the album they could at least play a FEW songs off it (they also did "Just like Honey" but that doesn't quite count). So yeah, three Psychocandy shirt designs and out of a very extensive set they played two (if I'm being generous) songs from the album. Note that they didn't have that many shirts for any of their other albums, but they certainly played more songs off them. There's a reason why Psychocandy is the only one I actually listen to anymore. I recognized at least four off Automatic (that was the first one I got so I'm better able to recognize that than the other later albums that I've barely listened to, even that I probably haven't listened to in about twenty years). It's also frustrating when you take into consideration how short those songs are. Much shorter than most of the songs they did play. They could have taken off ONE song, any one song and replaced it with just two more Psychocandy songs and I would have been BEYOND happy with the show. I wasn't asking for a lot. The whole thing kind of felt like this bad analogy. Imagine you're at KFC and you get your favorite item off the menu. You're eating it and you're enjoying it. It tastes pretty good but then you look out the window and see Gus's next door... Part of it was the frustration that it was so close to being so great. "In a Hole" was absolutely fantastic, they really did it right. Had they played a song from Psychocandy and it was lackluster, I would have wanted them to avoid it and not ruin it. But they COULD have done it really well. Just three songs from the album (not counting "Just like Honey," sorry if I seem like I'm shitting on that song, it's a good song, I like it, it works in the context of the album, but it's the one song that doesn't have the full SOUND of the album so without the others, it doesn't feel like you're addressing the album). Just three songs from the album would have taken about six minutes, eight at the most, out of a nearly two hour set. The didn't play any of it during the main set, so I thought maybe we'd get a mini-Psychocandy set for the encore. They come back with "Just like Honey" and I'm thinking, here we go! But they proceeded to mostly play other stuff with "In a Hole" three songs in and that's it. So yeah, that's my JAMC show feelings. Most other people loved it and were super into it and kinda looked at me weird when I said I was disappointed (though Mary Beth and Luís were on my side, and I think maybe Christopher by his facebook comment, I saw him during but not after the show was over). Brad said I just want to be negative about everything, but that's absolutely not true. I wanted to like it so much, I probably let myself get too carried away with wanting to like it, knowing they've played lots of Psychocandy stuff in recent years, and getting carried away with my enthusiasm. Set low expectations and all that. And I probably had that in my head, but I just started feeling it yesterday. Oh well. Seeing the wide array of Psychocandy merch when we walked into the New Daisy didn't help matters in lowering my expectations either. Okay, so after the show we met a bunch of our friends at Alex's. They were out of fries but I at least got to have a tasty burger. We stayed late with Luís just talking for a long time which was nice. Didn't end up leaving til 2:30 and I was barely able to hold my head up. Anyway, fun time and all, just wish I could have gotten more out of the performance.