Just a so-so night at La Tulipe unfortunately. I wasn't super familiar with either of the opening acts, and was hoping for a nice little surprise. Didn't quite turn out that way.
The first act, Barr, was a vaguely effeminate guy doing spastic spoken word stuff over programmed tracks. Either he didn't know what he was doing, or his machine kept fucking up on him, because it kept switching tracks on him. Dude seemed really nervous, and it showed. Could have potentially been interesting, but instead it ended up being kind of a train wreck.
The second act, First Nation had some technical problems of their own. Their electric congo drums or whatever they were weren't working at first, which caused a bit of a delay. Once they finally got started, the band put on a decent performance; kind of psychedelic, meditative stuff. The real problem was the fact that the band had ZERO stage presence. They hardly said a word to the audience throughout their set, and just never seemed to be the least bit comfortable. I'm not sure how used they are to playing in front of large groups of people, but they need to work on engaging the audience.
The pressure was really on Animal Collective at this point to put on a solid performance and salvage the evening. Thankfully they didn't disappoint. The guys put on a solid, well-paced performance. The transitions from one song to the next were perfect; the intensity slowly rising until it would reach a breaking point, only to subside before starting over. Aside from an unfortunate minor technical problem during
Grass, the band put on a pretty much flawless performance, and the crowd was really into it.
On the whole, Animal Collective is more than worth the price of admission, but I'd like to see them bring some better people along for the ride. Like a double bill with Akron/Family or something. *drools*
