October 20, 2004
The Decemberists at Maxwells, 10/16/04
Whew. It's been one hell of a weekend. I haven't really stopped since Friday evening. Which means that this is the first change I've really had to blog at length, and blog I shall. On Saturday night, I went with some friends from Chattanooga to see The Decemberists at Maxwell's in Hoboken. Getting there was something of a production, because we took NJ Transit instead of PATH, but Maxwell's never starts on time, so even though we were 45 minutes late, the opening band hadn't started yet. It was Norfolk and Western again, so I bugged out to the main dining room to get some food.
The Decemberists rocked again. The venue was much smaller than last time. Maybe only twice the size of my apartment. That didn't prevent about a hundred people from showing up. We did get there fairly late so we couldn't see all that well, but we were no more than 20 feet from the stage anyway.
They played a few songs from their forthcoming album (March 2005), tenatively titled Infanta, including the title track, which is a driving number about the coronation of a Spanish princess. If the rest of the album is that good, this is going to be a must-have.
They played pretty much the same kind of show they did at Webster Hall, but this one was a little more intimate, given the cramped space. They interacted with the crowd a lot more. During "The Chimbley Sweep", Meloy had the crowd crouch down during the dialog portion of the song.
All in all, a great show, but not a lot of surprises. I'm more convinced than I was before that Infanta is going to be amazing. Chalk up another one.
