The Long Blondes at Rock 'n' Roll Hotel 5/17 & Bishop Allen at Black Cat 5/18

Figured I should actually write these up.

Shorter The Long Blondes: second album not nearly as boring as I was led to believe from the actual album, but I won't be seeing them again unless they put out another album that is more like the first one, which is awesome. Setlist fairly similar to, if not exactly, this. Every time they'd play one from the first album, the crowd would go wild. Second album songs were much less raucously cheered for.

Rock 'n' Roll Hotel wasn't too bad of a place, smaller than I was expecting, but the location was terrible. The stage had a lot of speakers blocking parts of the stage even from those not too far back and in the middle, so what the hell? I'm going to have to really want to see a band if I go back.

Shorter Bishop Allen: they didn't play long enough. How can any headlining band play only 45 minutes plus a 5 minute encore? So frickin' awesome while playing though. I took a pic of the setlist, but it was all red, and somewhat hard for me to read.

Empire City
The Monitor
Like Castanets
The Light of the Lost
Quarter to Three
Middle Management
Rain
Choose Again
The News from Your Bed
Click Click Click Click
Busted Heart
Flight 180
The Same Fire
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Butterfly Nets
EDIT (Thanks, The Maestro): Things are What You Make of Them
Also, how the hell did they not play Corazon?

Also, I failed in being able to purchase both Bishop Allen albums, because no one was there when I was there at the beginning. $10 for the albums was much cheaper than what I could get online. I wanted the actual CDs. I was over there during The War on Drugs, which had one song that was this pounding drumming, and was ok, until the vocals just started to get to me.

I was in the second row during Bishop Allen, a place I hadn't been at a concert since I was in the front row for Superchunk in 2001. Not a particularly big fan of being that close unless I really want to see the band. I also wanted to mention that Justin Rice had very tight jeans, did weird dances throughout, Christian Rudder rocked the Rockelele, and Darby was delightful.