Winner? Warpaint.

Let's talk about last night.
1) Erin shows up at my house around six. I'm showering, she comes in to the bathroom and tells me that she loves me and that she's going to start making dinner. I can only hope that one day my life can resemble that in some fashion with my future spouse. Thank you Erin, for entering my life.

2) After a delicious dinner of honey-glazed miso salmon and brown rice, we head out around 7:30 to get some coffee (we're doing a sober concert-going) before the show and meet our friend Maz at the venue around 8:30.

3) We pick up our lattes from Coffee Bean and walk over to the Troubador where we find Maz. Hugs/smiles are exchanged and we wait while he grabs the tickets from will call.

4) There is a problem. Turns out, they don't have his tickets. They claim he never bought them. But he has the record of the purchase on his iphone on a random ticket site they've never heard of. He asks us if for some reason, they don't give him the tickets, would we want to buy tickets from the box office, since we came all the way down to Hollywood (mind you, he has already paid $30 for tickets to a show he's not even going to, he just decided to let his tickets not go to waste on us). We both say that we're broke and we would probably just go home and watch a movie. With this news, he steps back over to the box office.

5) Next thing I hear is Erin saying, "Maz, don't do anything dumb now." And of course he does. On top of the money he lost from the ticket scam online, Maz buys Erin and I tickets to last night's show. We can't even refuse them at this point, Maz is a winner. A winner indeed. We will be cooking him dinner on Thursday night, best believe that. He just invested $60 on a show he is not attending. Who.Does.That.

6) We walk into the venue with Phantogram playing one of their last songs of the set. Just a guy with his electric guitar and a girl mixing beats. Good sound, I could dance to this. So we do. It resembled something like this:

Phantogram - When I'm Small (Live @ Saratoga) from blair neal on Vimeo.

7) Enter Warpaint.
Three girls and a dude on drums. I'm not really into giving detailed music critiques. That's not what this is about. I enjoyed them. I especially enjoyed the fact that the girl on bass guitar was wearing a crew neck sweatshirt, some long johns that look like they had been living on her boyfriend for 10+ years and her hair was matted beyond anything you could hope to imagine. But she was working the stage like Jessica Rabbit. People could not take their eyes off of her, there was a confidence about her you don't see everyday. And apparently, this same girl in sweat pants is sister to an actress I love named Shannyn Sossamon.


That was refreshing. On top of that, they seemed like they were having a great time. It sounded a little something like this:

http://hypem.com/track/912719/Warpaint+-+Elephants


8) Here they are. School of Seven Bells.
To be honest, I like what I've been hearing from School of Seven Bells when I'm on my computer. In person, they were almost laughable. There is really only one musician out of the three members, granted I don't have a voice so I don't have any room to speak. But the two girls basically just stood there with their instruments, pretending to play while he and the pre-made beats did all the work. Their vocals were completely drowned out by the music. Grrrrr. The only upside to their performance was the fact that their beats were so loud that I had heart burn by the end of the night. It felt like minor earthquakes and God knows I love that.