cryforburke.

Wilco at Keyspan Park, Brooklyn

At this point we may as well change the name of this site to Wilco (the blog) ((yuk yuk)) But like you, we’re also getting sick of the parenthesis jokes.  Anyhow, we got a chance to see Wilco play over in Coney Island at Keyspan park and it was pretty fucking insane.

Luckily, Yo La Tengo opened this show instead of that girl from bright eyes and her new band.  Yo La Tengo is one of those groups we’ve kind of missed the boat on.  We’ve always had their albums laying around and knew they were supposed to be great but we just never got around to listening to them.  Big mistake.  They fucking rocked it hard.  Can’t really go into too much detail as we aren’t all that familiar with the material, but we can say it was a dance/guitar freak-out good time.  They played for exactly one hour and then promptly got the fuck off the stage to make way for the head liners.

We have to digress for a second and point out that there was a dude in the audience wearing a t-shirt that said “this is what a feminist looks like.”  FUUUUUUUUCK YOU!   Hey buddy, you ain’t fooling anybody with that shirt.  We all know you only wear that so you can bang girls who are waaaay too into Le Tigre.   Go fuck yourself.

Back to the Show.

Wilco came out to the Price is Right theme song and then opened up with their new album opener, Wilco (the song).  Now after repeat listenings, the song is skippable.  It sounded mediocre live as well and it seems like most of the audience agreed.  Thankfully the show kind of exploded after that.  Here’s a list of High/lowlights of the night.

The awesome…

the band itself - Tweedy and company were in rare fucking form.  We’ve never seen the guys so animated.  Something happened over the last year that turned the band into some serious rock smiths.

Hummingbird - Great song, Tweedy running in place/ swinging the mic like david lee roth…good stuff.

Spiders (kidsmoke) - They brought Ira Kaplan from Yo La Tengo out and the dude flat out killed it.  Between him and Nels Cline, it was hard to tell who was having the hardest guitar seizure.  13 minutes of Kraut rock/acid freak out.

Bull Black Nova - The best song on the new album is also the best new song to hear live.

One Wing - A close second.

Can’t stand it and I’m always in love, back to back - The guy standing next to us started speaking in tongues, no joke.

Hoodoo Voodoo - It only seems right that they closed the show with a song that was written only 3 blocks away from the venue.  They played it way harder and more rockin than the album version and we even got to see a short guitar fight between Nels Cline and Pat Sansone…More surprising was that Sansone held his own.

All the new songs but one - were much more satisfying heard live.  We’ll get to the one exception in a minute.

The not so awesome…

The guy in the lame shirt - can’t really say anything more about that idiot….just want to point out how much of an idiot he actually is.

Feist - It was supposed to be some kind of big treat to bring out the indie songstress and perform their crumby duet “You and I” but it just kind of brought the mood down.  You could tell she really thought she was stealing the show but again, she just seemed unnecessary.  The song would have been just as boring and cute if Jeff sang it by himself.

Feist and that jerk off from Grizzly Bear - They brought out the guy from grizzly bear so they could all sing “California Stars” together.  What a disaster.  The song was fine but dude didn’t know the words so he just stumbled through while shaking some maracas that you couldn’t even hear.  Feist was the same way…she played her tambourine and just got in the bands way.  Even worse is the fact that even after Tweedy said good bye to her, she continued to worm her way into the set somehow….can anyone say “attention slut?”

After the 5 or so times we’ve seen Wilco, this was easily the best they’ve ever been.  We’re looking forward to seeing them in a few months, after they’ve had a chance to really work the kinks out of the new songs.  Until then, we’ll keep looking for a recording of this show and put it on repeat.