The basic problem? Bluntly – Howlin’ Pete Almqvist wouldn’t shut up. I know it’s a challenge to play a full set when your catalog is as brief as theirs, but there’s just no excuse for stopping after every two-minute song to chatter about how wonderful your band is, and how terribly entertaining you just were; especially when it takes you longer to chatter about your song than it did to play it in the first place. At it’s worst, this is like musicus interruptus – it demolishes the natural cyclce of building and releasing tension that any dramatic performance in the Western world not explicitly billed as experimental should follow. I’ve never been this genuinely annoyed with a headline act. I’ll confess to feeling a bit frazzled beore I set foot inside the club, as I’d flown up from Atlanta only an hour before the show, after two full days of user research at an engineering conference (the joys of practicing IA on a tight budget…), but I wasn’t alone in feeling the interruptions and disliking them. On my left was a table of five frustrated concert-goers yelling the inevitable “You SUCK”, continuously. I’d say it was lack of experience, given their age and newness, but I know The Hives have toured for years, and it seemed that their refusal to engage was more capricious than accidental.
Oh, Mooney suzuki was there as well. What’s with the Snake? I didn’t mind their product (and it had those sly “we’re art school kids larking about with the identity of musicians” timber), but the vocalist looked and acted too much like Nicholas Cage doing his best Mod impression of Elvis to allow me to simply immerse myself in the music. The drummer lloked like one of the Nerds from Buffy the Vampire Slayer…