Last weekend I went down to L.A. on my friend Tim's tab. Seems my other friend Alex had planned to make the trip with his girlfriend Sarah to see The Faint with Tim, but Sarah ended up having other plans override the L.A. trip (namely a visit to see her dad in D.C.). So there was a free ticket in the offing. The problem for me, of course, was lack of funds to fly down. But Tim, flushed with dough from his new IT job, just straight-up bought me the plane ticket. How could I say no to an all-expenses-paid trip? He even put Alex and me up in a hotel room for a night (although that was mainly so we could get some gaming done in privacy, away from Tim's family). Crazy stuff. I wrote about our night of geekiness (and some attendant drama) over at my gaming blog, but the first night was the show itself.

So Alex and I flew in on Friday and saw The Faint that night. They definitely put on a good show. The opening acts were decent to awful (in that order); we actually sat down against the wall during the second act, and a bunch of people started following suit. Ha! The first act were actually pretty good. There was a singer/keytarist (is that a word?) and a drummer. My only problem with them, actually, was the smirk the singer had on his face the whole time. The highlight for the act was on two songs, when this guy who looked like a slightly duskier version of Will Ferrell sort of wandered out on stage with a sax and started honking along to the music. The second time he came out the crowd actually gave a big cheer.

The Faint were quite good indeed. I've never been to such a bass-heavy show. It was weird to leave the venue and not have my ears ringing. A refreshing change of pace. Alex said that at one point he actually felt his entire skeleton vibrate during one extremely bassy note.

I only have experience with one Faint album (Danse Macabre), so a lot of the songs were unfamiliar to me, on top of the fact that they're on tour to promote a new album. But they absolutely killed "Agenda Suicide," which they saved for the last song of their encore.



Oh, and the lead singer was dressed in a lab coat and aviator goggles, so major points in that regard.

One other weird thing was similar to my experience when I saw Wolfmother: the crowd mix was extremely random. You had the goth-industrial clique (surprisingly small and all about my age...sad), you had frat boys, you had plastic L.A. Barbie dolls, you had punkers, you had bull dykes and lesbos (a pair of pretty hot lesbians started full-on making out right in front of me during the second-to-last song--bonus!)...it was strange. But fun. I'm glad I went.

(I actually took a couple 15 second vids to send to Des during the concert; I'll see if I can upload them later and post them here.)