Helpless to the bass and the fading light

So we were at the Walk The Moon concert and considering the question that comes to everyone before a concert: when does it start, anyway? The tickets didn't say. The doors opened at 6:30, which might imply a 7:30 start. That hour came and went with just more people milling around. It wasn't until a few minutes before 8:00 that finally someone considerably taller than bunny_hugger came to rest in her line of sight, the official cue to start the opening act.

The opening act was The Griswolds, a band from Sydney, Australia, who've been touring with Walk The Moon lately. We didn't know anything about them, but they've got a pretty good indie-dance sound that fits sensibly with Walk The Moon. I most liked one of the last songs of their set, ``Be Impressive'', which if nothing else has a really good refrain.

This was, near as we can make out, our fifth time at a Walk The Moon concert. That let us feel like confident veterans when the lead guitarist asked how many people were seeing them for the first time, and the majority of the audience raised hands. Of course, neither of us can name anybody in the band. Among the audience members were a good number of people wearing face makeup, various patterns scrawled on their faces. We'd thought that was a gimmick the band had let fade out. However, they too had a couple bits of face paint, at least on the lead singer and one of the guitarists. I thought the drummer had some kind of spiral drawn on his forehead, but that seems to have been the shadow of his hair. They still came onstage to the opening riff from The Lion King, reminding us that we wonder if there's something furry going on in them.

Walk The Moon now have two albums' worth of songs, so the shows can't be just playing all the stuff they have anymore. At least at this show they avoided all the slower, moodier pieces. They've still got a lot of solid songs, of course; it just felt odd there wasn't any real quiet stretch. They also went the whole course of the main performance without doing ``Anna Sun'', their first signature bit, and I wondered if maybe they have reached the point of success that, as bunny_hugger's brother forecast, they would stop playing it. They have got a plausible replacement in ``Shut Up And Dance'', which is not just popular but popular enough it became one of the outro music pieces for the NCAA March Madness broadcasts.

But while it's plausible they will get big enough to stop playing ``Anna Sun'', they aren't quite there yet. It was saved for the encoure, as the final song of the night. Maybe the sixth time we see them. Maybe.

Trivia: Harry S Truman, in the 1920s, learned to play the difficult opening of Paderewski's Minuet in G from Paderewski himself. Source: 1945: The War That Never Ended, Gregor Dallas.

Currently Reading: Hoboes, Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, And The Harvesting Of The West, Mark Wyman.