I went to the Bright Eyes concert at the Henry Fonda Theatre (casenet) Thursday night. The Bruces (not my cup of tea) and M. Ward (very cool) opened.
Despite the sound being horrible all night – it seemed to get muddier as the night progressed; there was also an ear-splitting feedback incident which seemed to have taken out Conor’s right ear for the night (the show must go on) – I really enjoyed the set. I didn’t quite see the fifteen-piece orchestra, but the overall ambience created was good (the actual acoustics was shite of course). They played pretty much the entire Lifted album, with some of the songs translating better than others. For the encore, there were one or two new songs that I’d never heard before.
My friend commented that he couldn’t figure out if the arrangements were really good or bad because he was hearing lots of unisons, but it could have just been because the sound. While I’m not going to judge Conor’s compositional genius, I did notice that a lot of the harmonies/counterpoints (not to mention lyrics) didn’t make it through the board. What a total mess.
I also learned that yellow loading striped zones are not ticketed at night around there. This trick apparently doesn’t work around the tourist areas in Hollywood anymore because too many people had been catching on.