Concert review

All in all, it was an excellent concert evening. I was a little lonely, having gotten the cold shoulder from all my supposed music-loving friends, but it was still totally worth the trip up to Hartford to see Carbon Leaf.

The show was in the Webster Underground, which (as Erica can attest) is kind of a sucky venue, both in terms of size and in terms of ability to attract a crowd. However, the sound system was pretty good, and whoever was choosing the interstitial music gets my thumbs up as well (Stephen Kellogg AND Jump, Little Children! Who'da thought?). Audience-wise, there were probably 100 or so of the hardcore faithful present, and the club was just small enough that that made it feel somewhat fullish even though there was still a fair amount of elbow room to go around.

At any rate, the boys did not take the small crowd as an excuse to put on a half-assed show... no, no, this show was definitely one of the full-assed variety. Good, solid mix of songs from the two latest albums (including "What About Everything?," which I believe was one of ^kat^'s picks from the last album), with a few older and a few brand-spankin'-new cuts from the upcoming album (September, methinks?) thrown in for good measure.

Overall rating: 8.5 out of 10. Definitely worth the $16 ticket-at-the-door price (and even also worth the additional $15 I spent at the bar and the $10 I spent buying the one studio album of theirs I didn't have yet).

SPECIAL BONUS REVIEW: JON MCLAUGHLIN

So, the opener for Carbon Leaf was a guy named Jon McLaughlin and his nameless backup band. At first, I thought they were just a high school band that the Underground had scrounged up somewhere, because the guitarist looked like he was approximately 9 years old. But no, they were a real band, as I soon found out.

JM follows in a long and fortunate tradition of "openers who actually turned out to be really, really good in their own right." This tradition includes Carbon Leaf themselves (whom I believe we saw open for... was it Great Big Sea?) as well as Stephen Kellogg (Kat -- was it Robbie Schaefer we saw him open for?). Jon himself is an (enormous) (throbbing) pianist, which gave the overall band a vaguely Ben Foldsish feel, but with a little more guitar rock sound mixed in than BF has.

As Erica and I discussed at the SK6ers show a week or two ago, I think that there is a certain quality that some bands just have and some never figure out. That is the ability to make a song "pop"... i.e. arrange it and perform it so the sounds play well together and have interesting dynamics and form cool counterpoints and so forth, rather than just forming kind of a mishmash. I think a lot of opening bands, cover bands, bar bands, etc., are of the mishmashy sort, but JM was definitely of the popping variety. They played for almost an hour and there wasn't a dud in the bunch. (This includes their one cover, "Message in a Bottle," which they played just a bit uptempo and which I actually liked better than the original.)

At any rate, they got my highest seal of approval for an opening band: The faith CD purchase. Unfortunately, this had to be online, as they had packed up and headed out by the time I got to the merch table after Carbon Leaf, so I can't offer you a review of that yet. However, I will be sure to do so in 10-14 days when it arrives. Note: It already gets a couple points in my book because the title is "Songs I Wrote and Later Recorded," which I think is a great album name. And almost certainly truthful!

FYI: I think they are based in the general Indiana-Illinois area, and I believe their website (jonmclaughlinmusic.com) listed them as playing in Chicago at various points. So, I highly recommend ^kat^ check them out if she ever has some spare time. The rest of you I will be dragging along to their next CT show, never you fear.

Overall rating: 8 out of 10 on the general scale, 10 out of 10 on the "holy crap, the opening band didn't suck and in fact was quite good" scale.

SUPER-SECRET MEGA BONUS THIRD AND FINAL REVIEW OF THE NIGHT

Unfortunately, this is more of a negative review. Jessica Simpson is on the latest cover of Maxim, which initially made me very happy. However, said happiness was short-lived, as the article/pictorial seems to be following Maxim's recent disturbing trend of putting all the good stuff on the cover, and not really offering much beyond that (in terms of added hotness) on the inside.

Overall rating: 6 out of 10 on the general scale, 2 out of 10 on the dashed-hopes scale, and 9 out of 10 on the "heck, it's still Jessica Simpson, and crappy pictorial or not, she can feel free to have my babies anytime, and hopefully our IQs will average out and said babies will be at least vaguely intelligent, as in maybe not Yale material but presumably able to differentiate chicken from tuna" scale.

I believe it is now time for bed. Away I go!