Concerts are good - part 3

As you may now suspect, I went on a bit of a concert ticket buying rampage a few months ago. I do have reasoning for this because after nearly every concert I attend, I leave asking myself "Why don't we do this more often?" Thus, we attended two shows in four days' time.

Wednesday night held a show of: The National, Modest Mouse, and R.E.M. I appreciate some of R.E.M's stuff, but I mostly wanted to see The National and Modest Mouse. R.E.M. was ok, as the first half of their concert was mostly a performance of their new album and a bunch of Michael Stipe's rantings against George W. Bush. However, they interacted with the crowd a bit more and played a wider variety of stuff in the second half of the show. As I had hoped, The National was very good. I highly recommend their new album "Boxer," they have a full sound that is, at the risk of sounding like a fugazi music critic, "grand."

With that said, I must admit some tension in my recommendation of The National (not just because most recommendations come around to bite me because they end up offending folks, or are sometimes simply lousy recommendations) because the band has been around a while and the only stuff I know is their newest album. I like tracking a band, and seeing their progression. So there is my "I'm a bandwagon jumper" disclaimer.

Ok, enough with the rambling post. Here is a picture of an unexpected highlight of the show, when Eddie Vedder randomly joined R.E.M. for a final song: