Saturday Nights in Neon Lights
It's a pretty melody.
It might help you through the nighttime.
But it doesn't make it easy
To leave the party at the right time.
So I went to see Stars, because I [Maple Leaf] Canada.
Venue
Music Hall of Williamsburg. Do I go anywhere else? (Not really-the fact that Frightened Rabbit is playing at Terminal 5 is definitely one of the main reasons why I don't have tickets to that show.)
Opening Act
Milo Greene. They were interesting because there were five of them, and pretty much all of them except the drummer sang lead at some point. So one song had a guy with a Shins-style vocal, another had the girl up front, another was sung by a guy with a more emphatic rocker voice, and then there were songs that were handed off in the middle and had quiet-indie verses with a Springsteen-style bridge or something. There were three times they started a song and I thought, "this sounds like 'Yet Again,' by Grizzly Bear," which was annoying, but the one time I thought a song sounded like "Chicago" by Sufjan Stevens, it actually was. That won me over in the end, but that's an ambitious song to bite off, and they did it well without just copying the Sufjan version.
OPQ (Old-Person Quotient)
It was fine, without being great. The show was close to the apartment and had 9/10 settimes, but Stars came on late (it took Milo Greene forever to get all their stuff off the stage), so it got out later than I was expecting.
Seats/Position in Crowd/Up-In-Itness
We were pretty close to the front, but pretty far off to the side. The good thing, though, is that lots of Stars fans are short girls. I was in a sea of people my height. That never happens. (I spent a lot of time listening to a pair of girls around my height talking about the difficulties having sex with much taller men.) Anyway, we were Up In It with the shorties.
Setlist
The setlist is elusive. I remembered as much as I could and told Jesse for his post. I was pretty sure there were two songs that I was missing, though. Setlist.fm has supplied one of them, but not the other. So it's those songs +1.
In any case, there's a lot of good packed into that setlist. The two songs I was most hoping to hear, "Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It" and "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" are both on it, so I have no complaints. There was a part, though, where Mr. Stars said that, as a treat, they were going to dig really far back into the catalog and play some stuff they'd never played before. As a casual fan, that was not great for me. I would've liked "The Night Starts Here" or "Elevator Love Letter" instead of the rarities.
High Point
The one-two punch of "Hold On When You Get Love" and "Take Me to the Riot" right in a row was pretty amazing. Even though I left the show feeling like I didn't really have the need to see them live and in person again, the set reinforced for me just how good their songs are.
Low Point
Before the show, Jesse remarked about how we don't really know what they look like (though I think I saw the video for "Elevator Love Letter" back in the day). I believe he also mentioned how surprisingly goofy they were when we finally saw them. Mr. Stars was kind of hammy, and they were both older than I expected (though, God, how old does that make me?) and the set was very '80s-ish, so there were a couple times when they were dancing or gesticulating when I thought, "Stop it, Dad, you're embarrassing me."
Exuberance
Pretty high. People were going nuts, which is always fun. Jesse seemed surprised at how much the crowd was into it, but he doesn't know how much people love Canadian bands.