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It's Friday March the 3 around 10:38PM and

Matt Pond & Youth Group Destroy The Red Room

The Youth Group/Matt Pond PA show at The Red Room last night was, well, interesting. The Red Room is a shady spectacle - and if you should care to go, a helpful hint might be to keep to a strict bottled beer policy. I'm just saying. But the sound is actually pretty good - not that it would matter last night. Let's break it down shall we...

Youth Group - the very able Australian band - starts things off. The place was getting fairly busy and filling up. Lead singer Toby Martin has amazing hair. They are good. Song six or so the sound system blows, literally. Watching 5-6 people looking at the sound board scratching heads is hilarious. Not good. YG tries to keep going, and even return for a psuedo-non-electric set. Not good. About 45 minutes pass - maybe longer. The crowd thins to about 1/3 of what it was. Maybe 50 or 60 people are left. Bathroom is like the one in Trainspotting. (On a side note, Trainspotting came out 10 - ten? - years ago. Holy crap.)

Matt Pond PA comes on stage. You have to like a band that says this, "mpPA is currently driving around the country, playing shows, mimicking each other, gambling, dressing up as pirates (?), competing in feats of strength, and working at obtaining the finest jump-offs money can buy." Matt isn't really grooving on the situation which entertains what is left of the crowd. The highlight being how much he rides the sound engineer for the rest of the show. After pretty much every song. They built a beer pint tower on stage. The bouncer didn't think much of that move. They played their set. And then basically bolted for the bar as the last song ended - acknowledging that the crowd wasn't really interested in anything but drinking.

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Comments

Posted by: vanmega

March 5, 2006 03:59 PM

Hahaha... I too was at the Rob Wilson / Youth Group / Matt Pond show. A shame about all the technical glitchery... all the bands featured are really good.

Posted by: VICK

March 6, 2006 10:35 PM

Yeah, matt pond is really great, it's a shame his first show in vancouver was so sketchy.

damn the red room!

Posted by: jodi

March 14, 2006 10:32 AM

I was at this particular show, and as far as I'm concerned, Youth Group pulled it off amazingly.Their attitude re: the whole fuck up was great.I was talking to the drummer, Danny Allen, for the remainder of the night, and yeah, they were a little disappointed about their set being cut short, but they really made the best of it.Too bad all the YG fans there didn't catch their show the PREVIOUS night,in Seattle, like I did.Now there was a show.I just went to see Youth Group.They are better than fantastic in my opinion.'Nuff said....