05 December 2007

Motion City Soundtrack/Mae/Anberlin/Metro Station @ The Marquee

Metro Station was an alright band. We missed the first couple songs due to the (usual) gigantic line outside the Marquee, but still caught over half the songs. In that portion of the set though, there was only one song that really stood out to me, and one song that was pretty good, and the rest were all rather average. The band has the nice stereotypical modern Pop Punk image (aka "emo") and the songs certainly fit the image. I wish I had more to say about the band but the band didn't really stand out to me much. I might listen to a few of the recorded songs to see if they work better on CD, there did seem to be some potential.

As much as I like Mae, Anberlin really should have been after them for several reasons. One, Mae is a lighter, more atmospheric band and playing after such a dynamic band as Anberlin, they seem to fall flat at first. Secondly, there was not a more energetic cry of "one more song" after any of the other bands finished tonight, including Motion City Soundtrack. Anberlin was definitely a hit with the crowd. They played two pretty mediocre songs from Cities early on in the set, but the latter half of the set was all amazing. This band has great energy and is a blast to see.

Mae ended up playing for a pretty long time, which was good because initially they were pretty flat and I was wishing I had a chair, becuase Mae is a good band, but they're also a sit back and relax band more than they are a stand up band. By the end I was re-evaluating though, as they continued to pick up energy and by the end they were definitely rocking the crowd well. They weren't the best fit for this lineup still, and I'd like to see them with a more fitting lineup where I was more in the right mood to listen to their music. They were still quite enjoyable, if a bit less energetic than Anberlin (of course).

Motion City Soundtrack was a lot of fun as usual, though the crowd surfing was substantially less pervasive than the last time I saw them. Justin was almost assuredly totally wasted, but he was pretty fun interacting with the crowd as a result. The tradeoff was that he fucked up a fair number of songs, not terribly, mostly just lyrics. Oh well. Pretty good set list and like Mae and Anberlin it got progressively better as it went on.

The funny thing about this show was that among Anberlin, Mae, and Motion City Soundtrack, there all seemed to be fans there for just one of those bands. So unlike most shows, by the time the headliner was on, there was not a huge crowd. In fact amog the different band, crowd size seemed to be about the same for all of them due to the number of folks leaving after a band played. That was too bad because small crowds have less energy and are not as fun.

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