Tegan & Sara @ the Hiro Ballroom: 08-01-07

Another one of those posts I should have put out over a week ago, but that's the way work is swingin', baby. In between exhaustive trips to Phoenix the Missus and I met up with Indie Maven Sean and "finally 21 year-old" friend Victoria B. for some good eats and the Tegan & Sara show at the Hiro Ballroom.

Details are somewhat sketchy at this point, but dinner consisted of an excellent gnocci in pesto and nut sauce as well as 2 1/2 drinks (one half was tragically lost down the front of my shirt and shorts - I don't drink much at all anymore) that fueled my anti-Natalie Portman rant which, now sober, I still stand behind, although I'll readily admit my argument that night probably had more holes than Swiss cheese.

Anyway, all that was merely prep work for the always quirky and cool Tegan & Sara:

For whatever reason, about 5 songs into the set I realized that T&S were playing brand new album The Con in it's entirety in reverse order. Opener/Closer "Call It Off" was was a great, old-style tune that, upon further listening, is fast becoming a favorite track off the new album. For those uninitiated: Tegan is on the left, Sara is on the right.

The once-mighty camera phone was totally defeated in taking any close-up shots. From now on whenever I see a band I really like I'm smuggling in a regular camera. This is Sara performing "Like O, Like H" prior to some excellent off-kilter banter than was a highlight of the show.

We agree to disagree. For the new album I am firmly in the Tegan camp, while Sean was definitely preferring the Sara stuff. For my money, "The Con" (formerly entitled "Encircle Me") is the best song on the album.

No worries. After finishing up with the first song from The Con, T&S went right to the classics, from a great new arrangement of "Monday Monday Monday" to all the best songs from So Jealous, including my favorite, "Where Does the Good Go?"

Brief aside.

There are some songs that, for whatever reason, can completely encapsulate a moment or era in your life. Maybe it's a single line from a song, or the melody of a chorus or verse. The chorus of "Where Does the Good Go?" does that for me. It's the sound of every John Hughes movie, the soaring joys and devastating lows of falling in love when you're young, of meeting and losing friends, of realizing that you're moving from one stage of life to another, and the stage you're leaving will grow more distant every day.

I can't explain why the song does this to me - I know part of it has to do with the harmonizing over the chorus. But I don't care why - I just care that it does happen, and that I can with a single song go back to a time in my life when I was still unsure of the person I would become.

Aside over.

Overall the show was great. Although the sound was a little off from the last time I saw them at Webster Hall, the banter and back-and-forth with the crowd more than made up for it. Tegan & Sara are a band I continuously come back to, and tonight's show was simply one more reason why I do.