Ah the concert a time honered tradition of standing around in a group of drunken idiots listening often times to musicians that are in reality so over produced that they are unable to entertain any one live.

Tonight I did not go to that concert, or at least not part of it. Tonight I saw Secret Chiefs III and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. Lets do a bit of a vivisection of this concert shall we?

Venue: The Bluebird theater here in denver. Its a lovely old theater with a bar on the main floor and a balcony for the kiddies who are too young to drink.

The mob: Mostly artsy fartsy quasi goth/emo folks with some old school metal and punk fans thrown in for good measure. The only ones who were really drunk enough to be annoying were the few that looked like frat boys. For the most part the group were those that you would call outside the social norm. There was something odd however that I noticed that will be included in this diagram.

The opening band: The Secret Chiefs III. I was beyond impressed by this band. A group of eight people that looked like your garden variety freeks. Made up of one lead guitar, a backup guitar, bass, violin (note at times there were two violins made up by the backup guitar) keys, and drums and one person on various indian instruments. I can only discribe the music of this band as what you would get if you combined middleastern with metal with a dose of celtic, surf guitar, and one song that could have happened other wise only if Ennio Morricone had gone on one hell of a bender and decided to write some of his best spaghetti western music on acid.

The band members said little to nothing, infact the only time one of them really spoke was to appologize when they had to start a tune over due to two of the musicians starting in different keys. This is important as half the time durring the music some, much, all of it was not in the same key, so it is very important when they are supposed to be. This is the type of band whos first song was in 17/4 time or something like that and at one point they managed to play a song in the key of 5. They would end songs on unresolved chords. At times there were notes in songs that made my nerves want to kill themselves and my brain explode. All with out appology as if even if only to them what they were doing made total sense. The band them selves interacted on a wonderfully intamate level with each other, taking cues off of bodylanguage alone, or sometimes clearly sharing a moment in the music with each other only letting the audience watch. Other times they would briefly look into the audience and connect with some one watching, on the rare occasion this would cause them to smile.

They had a talent for what they did, and did it in an orriginal and wonderful manner that made me actually want them to come out a keep playing. This was beacuse each person did what they did well, and only did that.

STGM: This was another avante garde band that sadly did not have the polish or pride it seemed that THC3 had. That isnt to say that they were bad, they simply were not doing the same thing. The band consited of a lead singer, a bass, a female vocalist / violinist/ odd instrument, a backup guitar / vocalist/ percussonist, and a drummer. I make a distinction between percussion and drummer because the former was banging on things such as sinks.

The problem is that they wavered between whispy weird music sung beautifully by the female of the group, and your standard heavy handed death metal. I found the fist wonderful and cool, her voice grabbed your attention with its beauty (she actually did have a wonderful voice) and held you there listening to her. The second was all growly and angry, and dull. It had little to seperate it from every other band out there doing death metal.

My last bit with this band, sadly wasnt due to the band but due to a bad choice made by their lighting tech. You see the lead singer had on white face paint (which I know is such a shock from a death metal band that you can hardly believe me) but the light that they chose to splash on him from below was a yellow that mixed with the blue from the back lights to create a sickly green. At times it was all I could do to not imagine it was "The Mask" talking to me and screaming into his microphone.

The night in total: All in all I had a wonderful night, I had some wonderful tequila before the concert, had a great friend enjoying it beside me, and was even able to come home and tell my wife all about it.