02.17.2008 Birds and Batteries / Wintersleep / Radamacher

The High Dive is located in the Fremont area of Seattle. Walking around, it resembles Commercial Drive. (Vancouver reference). Spotting a Matt Good gig poster (at some tavern), a couple of things occured to me. For one thing, the 1-200 seat tavern is a far cry from the sold out small to mid theaters he was playing to just last year. (Relative) success in Canadian markets don't always equate to success in the US, or even filling seats for that matter. To beat the dead horse, last night Wintersleep sold out the ~900-1000 seat Commodore. This particular night they were playing second (3 band bill), in front of less than 20 people, with a birthday party headlining the night. I think I may have even counted members of the other bands. I wouldn't be suprised if there were only 10 paying customers for this show.

Radamacher, a four piece band, opened the night playing indie type rock. I don't remember where they were from but I do remember instrumentally they were pretty good. I didn't like the guitarist/vocalist's singing though. It just seemed out of place. They also played 2 cover songs, which was odd, because I always thought touring bands (ones that don't have 'a tribute to' or 'the music of' in their names) left their covers at home.

Wintersleep played about 40 min and looked pretty relaxed in spite of playing for the sorriest looking crowd they've had to play for in about 2 years. They played without a setlist and pretty much decided on songs as they went along. At one point Paul even asked how long they had left to play. This is the first time I've ever seen a show without Nerves or Danse.

Setlist

Archaeologists
Caliber
Weighty Ghost
Murderer
Search Party
Oblivion
Yellow Bellied


San Francisco five piece Birds and Batteries opened their set with a rendition of Neil Young's Heart of Gold. At this point I was thinking, oh gawd, did Wintersleep just open up for a cover band?. Fortunately they weren't a cover band, but they certainly were interesting. They have sort of a alt country / indie rock sort of sound and had a drummer that used laptop loops. This meant they would from time to time, go into electronic techo beat-like passages. As a band they weren't terrible, but their songs seemed to have too much going on. The slide guitar, while nice, didn't add to much to the songs.

Did I mention the night was 'headlined' by a Birthday party.

$10/$6