Hold Steady/Art Brut/1990's @ 9:30 Club [11/20/07]

So The Hold Steady, Art Brut and The 1990's hit DC tonight as part of the NME Rock N Roll Riot Tour. It should have been called the Are You Tired of Our Shtick Yet? tour.

If you're not familiar with them, let's do a quick recap:

The Hold Steady: A talented band with a frontman (Craig Finn) whose "lyrics" are intelligent, funny, and sometimes even moving. However, I use quotation marks around lyrics because they're not so much lyrics as merely dialogue. Finn doesn't sing so much as rhythmically talk over the band's songs. While their music is good (and can be great at times), I admit that the shtick is starting to wear thin for me.

[Sidenote: Part of what makes their shows difficult for me is the legions of fan-boys in the crowd who feel it necessary to "sing" along all of the "lyrics" with Craig. If you can't envision how ridiculous this is, imagine attending a speech given by Noam Chomsky, and then imagine 200 frat-boys in backwards hats yelling along with Chomsky word for word:

"The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat." (via WikiQuote.

While not quite this, um, political, Craig's lyrics can be just as dense at times, and the idea of "singing" along to them is just absurd. Yet people do it.]

Art Brut: A not-as-talented band with a frontman (Eddie Argos) whose "lyrics" are sometimes funny, not particularly intelligent, and not even moving accidentally. Argos "sings" in the same way Craig Finn sings -- by talking loudly and occasionally slurring words together. While there's no denying Argos' skill as a frontman or his ability to write a clever, funny song, that's really about all there is to Art Brut. The shtick wears off with Art Brut about 2 songs in.

The 1990's: The 1990's shtick isn't that they have a clever frontman who speak-sings their lyrics. No, their shtick is apparently that they suck. And that they copped the guitar part for one of their biggest hits from the theme to The Cannonball Run. They seemed like nice enough chaps on stage, but their music was essentially warmed over Arctic Monkeys, which is itself warmed over Franz Ferdinand, which is itself garbage.

So, yeah, I wasn't real thrilled with tonight's show.

In fact, I left about 30 minutes into the Hold Steady's set. Not because their set was bad (it was OK), but because someone at the 9:30 Club decided that it would be a good idea to RIDICULOUSLY OVERSELL the show. I had a pretty good spot near about 10 feet from the stage, but as the Hold Steady's set started, it literally got so tight that I was having a hard time breathing. So I tried moving back, but the entire floor was so crowded that the only spot I found was a small gap in the far back corner of the room (where it was impossible to see the stage). So after trying without success to find a better spot upstairs, I left. It simply wasn't worth my time any more.