Oh Bloodhag, your shtick never gets old. It’s been a while since I saw these dudes, and thankfully very little has changed. The new songs sounded great, especially the one about Daniel Pinkwater. “When I was a kid I wrote a letter to Daniel Pinkwater and he told me to stick with my writing…and now I’m in this shitty band.” Self-deprecating stage banter, tough metal, and paperbacks being mercilessly slung at the audience is good entertainment.

After Bloodhag’s set I was having a chat with my boy Timmy at a table when a particularly drunk blonde came up and stated scooching me over on the bench with her butt. After a few confused “Hellos” she let us know: “Okay, I just need to get this out into the open… I have three kids. Two dogs and a cat. The first dog is a rat terrier, he’s this big (shows her hand), and he was lonely, so I had to get another one for him to play with. Then, someone just left this baby kitten on my door! They really are like kids…” For some reason during this oddly personal ramble she was rubbing my back. Tim was very interested in chatting with the woman about dogs, but when he compared rat terriers to Jack Russell terriers she turned to me and said angrily, “I just lost all respect for this man.” I asked her if she was there to see Captured By Robots, and she gave me a bewildered look. “Yeah, I heard something about robots.” “It’s pretty cool, this guy made his whole band, and they actually play their instruments.” She looked at me like I was retarded.

At this point someone trying to get their purse stashed behind us knocks a beer over and gets the strange girl wet. Tim is already standing up, so I hand my camera over to him for photo documentation as drunk stanger is up-set. The strange girl demands that the spiller buy her a beer for getting her wet, and they enter into some bizarre, drunk, angry but passive aggressive confrontation that involves holding each others hands. I take this opportunity to move up to the front, leaving my back-rubbing stranger to hit on guys in the drink line.

For this tour Captured by Robots has adopted a completely political theme, with JBOT playing the role of George W, Dick Cheney on strings and Condi Rice on the drums. Obama, Hillary and Joe Biden made up the horn section, and the large and small dogs with symbols took on the personalities of Wolf Blitzer and Nancy Pelosi. As I had expected, seeing the robots play instruments was still impressive, and the music was pretty bad. The opening metal rendition of “Hail to the Chief” was funny enough, but after the first few songs my attention waned. Especially when the hi-hat mechanism broke, leaving the Pelosi and Blitzer robots to have a banal filler conversation about how Bush was bad but Pelosi can’t do anything about it. When the hi-hat immediately broke again, JBOT apologized to the crowd and assured us that it would be fixed shortly. The guy next to me yelled, “Take your time, we’re all drunk!” This is when I realized I had two strikes against me for the show: I was stone sober and I was never going to relive the magic of seeing the robots the first time. Plus I was stuck next to some douchebag human-megaphone that worked security there belting out bullshit at the top of his lungs every couple minutes. Enough was enough. On my way out I took a peek for my back-rubber but she was gone. Sigh.