They Might Be Giants’ entire 2+ hour set last night can be summed up in one hilarious moment. On the recent tour, the band has taken to blasting humorous amounts of confetti into their audience. At one point during the show, there was so much confetti in The National that the band couldn’t get through “Lucky Ball & Chain”. They stopped mid song, too tickled by the confetti to seriously play, and then just moved on to “Blue Canary: with promises that they would make up the skipped song.

Seeing the band was an experience. After years of being happily relegated to dudes my own age (and recently younger) stumble onto stage and tear through 30 minutes of rage, it’s nice to see dudes who play music to genuinely make themselves and others laugh. The crowd was comprised of what you’d expect, people who don’t fit into any other subculture and likely have seen the films of Monty Python more then a couple of times. I mean, TMBG is basically two guys. One writes songs about strange interactions he has with others, while the other writes songs about strange interactions he has with himself…plus they do kids’ songs.

The cool thing about seeing TMBG play live was that they sounded like a real band. Many times with bigger, older acts who take the time to do fairly elaborate light shows with their live music, what you get sonically is an almost lip-synched version of their album. The band is so tight that you just feel like you’re listening to an unreleased version of their full length and none of their engineering or arrangment secrets are revealed. With TMBG, I saw them switch to silly instruments, heard the (very rare) flaw in their near-perfect harmonies, and even witnessed a few equipment malfunctions. The banter between sogs was real, and the puppet show was (of the puppet show) was hilarious!

The danger for a show like this, where an older band is forced to play through their 20 year old hit album, is that the band will be half-hearted and the crowd only responsive to the hits. These things had no bearing on last night. TMBG seemed happy just to have a near sold-out room, the crowd was happy to see the band regardless of what they played, and fairweather fans like myself had a good excuse to have fun at a rock show without getting sweaty, drunk, pushed around, or stricken deaf.

P.S.

They had THE most amazing trumpet player that I have ever seen live…and I’ve seen a lot of ska bands.