|
[review]
Circumstances of the day had us leaving out at 4pm to start a 4 hour
drive, to arrive at Gabes Oasis at 8pm (when the doors opened).
Traffic and Construction were unusually kind, the only delays we had
were getting food, and a brief encounter with a 40 foot visibility
downpour, a slight problem interpreting our map, and a short hunt for
an ATM for cash. We arrived at Gabes Oasis at 9:10 on my watch.
Going up the stairs to Gabes, we ran into Blake. A quick question
confirmed that no, we had not in fact missed their set. Whew! We
got upstairs, and found the stage. Playing that night was :
Faultlines, Alto Heceta, Rilo Kiley and Desaparecidos. We had
arrived during the very beginning of Faultlines set, which left me
wondering, had I not taken into account a time difference, or had
everything begun an hour after the doors opened. We milled around
the crowd listening to the bands. During Faultlines set, they
mentioned the other bands that would be playing, and had some
questions on the pronunciation of 'Kiley', which quite a number of
people in the crowd kindly helped them with. After Faultlines Alto
Heceta took the stage. I really enjoyed Alto Hecht's set, and wished
I had enough money to pick up one of their albums as well. Alto
Heceta played two songs, and exactly at the finish of their second
song, the power went out completely. Zippos and Bic lighters to the
rescue, and we had some light, while we waited out the 5 minute,
whole block, power outage. Lights finally came back on, and Alto
Heceta finished their set.
Finally, Rilo Kiley took the stage, the air conditioning again
lacking, and the crowd building quickly. A joy to my ears, the first
song of the evening was Always! Jenny had a new mini-keyboard, I
couldn't tell what make it was, it looked similar or identical to the
old one. They again played some of their older songs, and some of
their newer songs, I wish now I'd taken notes on which songs were
played. I noticed many among the crowd singing along, and many more
bobbing to the beat. The air was again hot, but not quite as bad as
Fireside. Rilo Kiley again played amazingly, they bounced around the
stage with energy I wouldn't have thought possible, sweat was
literally dripping off of them as they played. Lighting was better
at this, and I had a better place in the crowd to take pictures from,
so I managed to get some pretty nice pictures, as I suspect a few
others in the crowd did as well, judging from the flashes. During
the set they mentioned that they were sad that it was the last night
of their tour with the Desaparecidos.
Afterwards, we went back to the CD table. Blake was again the first
to show up, he went back to the car to get 2 copies of The Initial
Friend which we bought. I gave Blake a CD with the pictures I took
at the He was kind enough to autograph both of them for us, as well
as RC's copy of their original CD. We then caught up with Jenny, and
she was also kind enough to autograph the now, stack of CDs. Since
it was now 12am, and we still had a 4 hour drive back home we didn't
have time to stay around too long.
The drive home was long, and after we crossed the Mississippi was
shrouded in 100-150 foot visibility fog, the entire way through
Illinois until we got back to I 294. All in all the concert was well
worth the drive, all 570 miles of it.
- positronic_cat
|
