• Foals

They have en encore performance tonight at the Neptune with Surfer Blood.

More photos after the jump

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• Beth Crook
• Daughter

To those familiar with Daughter and Jeremy Messersmith, the program at Neumos last night might have seemed a little imbalanced. A trio of austere Londoners paired with a witty (and sometimes irreverent) Minnesotan? Madness! But aside from their ties to Glassnote Records, these two acts have another thing in common: their stage presences endear them to audiences so much that, in between songs, all I could hear were remarks of "Isn't he/she cute?"

Messersmith took the stage at 9, armed with a guitar, a loop pedal, and an offbeat sense of humor. Highlights from his set included an ode to girls who run merch tables at shows and a song based on a motivational poster he saw on Reddit. ("Someday, someone will love the fuck out of you.") My favorite was "I Wanna Be Your One-Night Stand," about a middle-aged man with a mini-van who decides to rediscover his youth by having a "one-night stand" with a woman who is eventually revealed to be his wife. (Sort of like an alternate-universe version of "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)," where our protagonist and his lady really want to make things work and synthesizers apparently don't exist.)

• Beth Crook
• Jeremy Messersmith

Then it was time for Daughter, who opened their set with the title track from their excellent new record, If You Leave. Like her 4AD labelmate St. Vincent, frontwoman Elena Tonra is endearingly awkward onstage: she stammered out sincere "thank you"s in between songs and seemed astonished that her band had managed to sell out Neumos. (When Daughter last visited Seattle in late October, they performed on the significantly smaller Barboza stage, though they claim they attracted a colorful crowd, including a zombie.) It isn't hard to imagine a man telling Tonra that she's "too old to be so shy," but her modesty is what makes her so enjoyable to watch. The crowd joined her in singing "Candles," "Youth," and other tracks from the band's two EPs, and called for an encore for which the band didn't seem entirely prepared. "We're going to play one more song for you... and it's a cover," Tonra said, grinning nervously as she picked up her sparkly gold bass and launched into a rendition of Daft Punk's "Get Lucky." I might be going out on a limb here, but Daughter could cover just about anything and still sound captivating.

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• MGMT (Andrew VanWyngarden) at Showbox Sodo

A glitchy cosmic seagull was among the the interplanetary spirit guides for MGMT's set at the Showbox Sodo last night. Arriving in the middle of an "interesting markets" tour (Seattle and Portland are among the bigger/more standard stops) and in advance of a new album (due in June) they spent a compact set reminding audiences of some of the less famous songs from Oracular Spectacular, bringing out some (but not enough!) of the highlights from under-appreciated Congratulations, and rolling out some new songs for a crushed-to-the-front, more-comfortable-in-the-back sold-out crowd. The main set was sprinkled with three fresh tracks that will by now be familiar to YouTube tourstalkers: the disconcertingly upbeat "Your Life is a Lie", fuzzy psych throwback "Introspection", and noisy synth-heavy jellyfish jam "Mystery Disease", along with what sounded like some newish instrumental interludes, while Record Store Day cassette-only exclusive (now an "official lyrics video") Alien Days led the short encore.

Overall, the performance and accompanying constantly shifting, mostly intentionally glitchy, brightly colored, often hypnotic light show served as a mission statement that those kids who wrote a couple of insanely catchy pop songs had left the building and are now firmly on course to follow other ambitions: definitely in line with the previous material, but possibly a bit deeper instead of world-conquering. The kids up front seemed OK with it, in the absence of traditional pop hits, they were still happy to crowdsurf to whatever the band felt like playing and scrambled madly for flowers tossed from the stage when the show concluded.

crowd notes: seeing a woman hoisting up an child so that he can get a better view of a band reminiscing about playgrounds, animals, digging up worms from the vantage of rock stars growing tired of models and drugs, and realizing that the child was probably born after the song was written gives a whole new depressing spin on already secretly downer "Time to Pretend", doesn't it?

bar notes: I say this every time, but man, Showbox Sodo is pretty much the opposite of Showbox (original flavor) in just about every structural way possible. One has a bar with hundreds of perfect sightlines, the other has a bar with four barely adequate sightlines. Et c.

style notes: MGMT is the band that I (possibly unfairly) associate most closely with the dawn of the facepaint and featherwave period. About halfway through a deep instrumental jam in the middle of the show, Andrew VanWyngarden was miraculously wearing a floral headband; another indication that the signs at Coachella pointing to a new festival fashion era may have been correct.

(more lightshow soaked pictures after the jump.)

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• This guy kept saying, "I'm Macklemore's little brother!"

I asked Anna Minard to the Allen Stone Bumbershoot Announcement Prom at the Crocodile last night. Unfortunately, we did not get gussied up, but HOLY SHIT EVERYONE ELSE DID! I thought we were going to see some funny '80s prom dresses, or maybe some wonky tutus and other costumes, but really, most everyone was dressed in NO-BULLSHIT PROM WEAR FOR ADULTS. Curling-iron ringlets, shiny ties, color-coordninated flower corsages, and sparkly Express dresses in cleavage and cleavage-plus varieties. Not a casual couple in the bunch! Except for me and Anna. Good thing the Croc has the best pizza and a non-venue area to eat it in.

What else? A prom kind and queen were voted in by applause, Allen Stone sang his soulful hits and encouraged dancing/discouraged arms-crossed pouting, Stone's drummer took off his prom jacket to reveal nothing but a bow tie and suspenders (and probably pants, but whatever, he was sitting down). OH! And the Bumbershoot lineup was announced via animated words projected the back of the stage. Massive WOOOOs went down for MGMT, fun., awkward silence for the Zombies. So it goes.

More hot prom pics below! It's like a 300% shittier cell-cam version of What You're Not Wearing!

• "The blue in my hair is for the Seahawks!"

• Best tie of the night. And lipstick. And everything, really.

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After a curious walk through cops on foot, cops on bikes, and cops in cars, I finally made it into Chop Suey a few seconds before LA sun sisters (Jessica and Jennifer Clavin) Bleached started their first song.

• Hotcellphonestockphotos.com
• You can't see the clear instruments, but they're there!

Bleached were joined by tour bassist Micayla and drummer Jon (even though he may or may not have broken his foot jumping off of Hunters' van in a party moment), who both played clear instruments! You just can't beat clear instruments. Unless you have glitter instruments.

Bleached started off with "Waiting on the Telephone," a simple and ridiculously catchy tune that might be one of my favorites off their new album Ride Your Heart. Other set favs included the Fleetwood-tinted "Searching Through the Past," and the ultra-dreamy "Outta My Mind." I think for me, it's the pop vocals and harmonies that seem effortless in a way that no one is trying too hard—Bleached are just keeping it real and sounding fantastic while their at it. OH MAN, aaaand they covered Misfits "Hybrid Moments" and Ramones "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World"—I think I want them to be my new besties.

- Confidential to the dude sitting/lounging on the side of the stage, making weird eyes at the audience: no.
- Confidential to that party-fountain ponytail: yes, yes, a thousand times yes!

The Thermals show at Neumos last night was the kind of all-ages situation I would have killed for as a youth. The opening bands were the fine La Luz and Wimps, and the entire front-of-stage area strictly for dancing. No old people standing still with beers in their hands—that was for the upstairs.

Since I am an old person and wanted a beer in my hand, I went to the 21+ attic where it was 25 degrees warmer, which is just fine because toasty > chilly, any day. Upstairs, I could hear the thermals, but could not see them—there just isn't a great way to see bands from the top floor unless you're right against the railing, an area that's always fully lined with strangers who don't like when you mosh up on them (for some reason).

• Blown-out cellphone pic 420
• View from the top!

Anyway, the Thermals always and forever sound like really good, simple, catchy rock n' roll. No frills. No toms on the drums. No specialty vocals—Hutch's naked voice is all they'll ever need. Elegant crusties and squeaky clean teens alike danced and shouted along. An encore was demanded, obviously, and sweaty jump-hugging and head shaking exploded when "No Culture Icons" started... which reminds me, in a roundabout way. Why aren't the Thermals on Sub Pop anymore?

The Sparks show last night was the exactly the sort of show* you want on a Monday. It started on time at 8pm, no waiting around, no surprise openers, nothing but the pure wonder of the brothers Mael visiting Seattle for the first time ever!

I walked in about 10 minutes late, right as my faaaavorite Sparks song "At Home, At Work, At Play" started. I stopped dead and, I don't know, felt like crying? Is that ridiculous? On the Neptune's cozy stage, Ron was perched behind his giant keyboard (with brand name Roland rearranged to spell Ronald), Russell stood front and center wearing pedal pushers and holding a cordless mic. Ron looks basically the same as he ever did—a perpetual and stylishly unstylish old man with slicked-back hair (and now with owlish glasses and a pencil thin mustache instead of the Chaplin), wearing pleated pants belted high. Russell's looks have changed, and though I wish he still had the fountain of T. Rex-esque curls (he now wears his hair sort of plastered down and with side-swooped bangs), he looks fantastic for his 62 years.

AND HIS FUCKING VOICE? Are you kidding me? The entire Sparks show amounted to Ron and Russell alone on stage, plonking and belting out masterpieces from Kimono My House, Angst In My Pants, No. 1 In Heaven, and beyond (I certainly didn't know every song, but that didn't really matter). A few highlights included the recitation of a scene from their terrifically strange concept album The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman, the best version of "Singing in the Shower" (originally a duet with Les Rita Mitsouko) ever, and of course, Ron's frenzied-dancing finale.

Though I would have killed to see them with a live band and all the bells and whistles of a full-on Sparks rock show, there was something more... dignified and engrossing about this kind of performance. Maybe they don't need to pretend that nothing has changed, maybe they're just owning the change that is inevitable and showing off what truly sets them apart: their ridiculous talent and everlasting weirdness.

* Yes, the show didn't sell out. Yes people in Seattle are bad at dancing and clapping and being alive at shows. But looking at Sparks' Facebook page gives me the impression they had a really good time! As I think most of the audience did (looking at you wasted "WOOOO" dude behind me), so I'm not going to mega-negs about that.

From my friend and Seattle musician Dita Fox:

Every serious Prince fan has encountered numerous anecdotes about the amazing, intimate club shows Prince has given in the middle of the night at First Avenue or some nightclub in Paris. Last night, we got one in Seattle. (Actually, we got two—I saw the 11:30 pm show, and reports from the 8 pm show sound identical.)

The basic set-up: This was an intimate club performance by Thirdeyegirl, an all-female band with a male lead singer, who happened to be Prince. The basic question: Would Thirdeyegirl be a tool for Prince to communicate weird new free-jazz feelings, or would this be a Prince show with a hot new band?

This question was answered almost immediately after the lights went out, the band came on, and the stage exploded with amazing virtual pyrotechnics as Thirdeyegirl launched into "Let's Go Crazy," performed in a slowed-down, power-chord heavy version. It was electrifying and just the beginning.

This was definitely a Rock Show—Prince kept his guitar on all night, with things getting seriously funky only towards the end, when he brought out the Controversy classic "Let's Work" and—OHMYGOD—"A Love Bizarre." But holy shit what a rock show. The set list was both a fan's dream and from outer space, ranging from humongo-hits ("U Got the Look," "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man," "When Doves Cry") to beloved B-sides ("She's Always in My Hair"!) to weird catalog gems (The Gold Experience's "Endorphinmachine"! Chaos & Disorder's "I Like It There"!) The whole thing ended with a stageful of dancing band/audience members, and Prince DJ'ing a career-spanning medley of hits, over which he sang live and praised Seattle. We responded by losing our minds.

It all happens again tonight—twice!—at Showbox at the Market.

• Savages "... believe that the use of phones to film and take pictures during a gig prevents all of us from totally immersing ourselves"

Appropriately enough, their album, scheduled for release next month on Matador is titled Silence Yourself.