J'aime les Oui Oui Oui
Altogether a very good show, despite many and massive flaws. Here's how it shook down:
1) The first guy, Imahn somehting-or-other, was an extremely talented musician and songwriter, whose music was not at all interesting enough to hold my attention. This may be by virtue of the fact that he is just one dude with an acoustic. He was surprised and confused, like he didn't expect to be on stage at a rock concert.
2) Blood on the Wall were good and sort of punky for an indie rock group. Their performance suffered from the fact that they had little stage presence; the drummer was the most exciting member of the group.
3) The Yeah Yeah Yeahs rocked our lame -- and let me emphasize LAME -- asses. The quality of performance was extremely high, basically album quality. The drummer and guitarist were all subdued and emo-ish in their black clothes; Karen O owned the crowd. She is a great deal more charismatic than I had imagined: my eyes hardly strayed from her. All she had to do was smile -- and she has a massive, beautiful smile -- and everyone was screaming, completely hers.
4) The Orpheum has great sound. But it is a brutal place to hold a rock concert. Seats? Inexcusable.
5) The crowd was very bad overall. It was about average for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but extremely apthetic and rude for the other acts. When you are in a theatre where people can watch you walk up the aisles to leave, then you don't leave in the middle of an act. That is just disrespectful. The people who advertised the show did not tell us who the opening acts would be and how many they were, so we had no idea what to expect. But this is no excuse to be so lame to the poor guys.
All in all, though, it was worth it, just because the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are so fucking good.