Tin Speaker

White Rabbits free show? Count me in! Hooray! Love it. Great stuff. Fantastic.

I was rather hoping to get down in time to catch Motel Motel, too, but no luck there. People were clearing the stage between sets, so I guess I just missed them. This was disappointing for me. I attempted to suffocate my sorrows with mouthfuls of New York City’s largest strawberry shortcake, but was left somewhat disappointed. The “shortcake” was actually just a regular white sheet cake, with boring white frosting and a syrupy, unnatural strawberry filling. None too pleasing, to this hornblower’s taste buds.

Good thing White Rabbits were about to play. Good thing, also, that I was totally wasted! College!

I wasn’t, really. Not to say I was sober as a judge, though. I’m always at least three or four drinks deep — you know this, dear reader.

White Rabbits’ set leaned decidedly toward material from the new album, understandably. This was, after all, a free show, so no real obligation to the fans to play “the hits” (such as they may be). Plus, they they do have an album to promote. As my more dedicated followers will already know, I have taken a shine to said new album, and since I’ve seen them play the Fort Nightly cuts before plenty of times, I appreciated their set list decisions. And besides, they played the best three songs off Fort Nightly — While We Go Dancing, Kid On My Shoulders and The Plot. So come on now.

The new songs sounded good live, which I rather expected, since they’ve been working on them for a while, now. I think this was the first time in my four times seeing White Rabbits that I’ve seen them use an acoustic guitar, and though I do like watching singer Steve Patterson play the piano because he goes wild, it was a nice little addition to the usual set-up (which is pretty rad as it is, with guitars and piano and two drummers for many of the songs, singers hitting drums, dual lead singers, blah blah blah). I propose that most bands could be made better by the addition of an extra drummer.

Observe a previous post, which begins with White Rabbits and then flies off into new and exciting directions here.

Set list, with some perhaps helpful translations (check the picture and you’ll see what I mean):

Right Where They Left [formerly Chevy Chase]
While We Go Dancing
They Done Wrong / We Done Wrong [formerly Ethiopiques]
Lionesse [formerly Punk]
Midnight And I [formerly Sleep]
Rudie Fails
Percussion Gun [formerly Burundi]
Kid On My Shoulders
The Lady Vanishes [formerly Ragtime, though it says Lady on the set list]
The Plot
Company I Keep
The Salesman (Tramp Life)

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This entry was posted on 06 May 2009 at 3:36 pm and is filed under music. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: fort nightly, it's frightening, nyu, nyu strawberry fest, nyu strawberry festival, set list, setlist, white rabbits

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