5-6-7-8 ROCK

Last week, I went to two concerts.  Both of them featured a two-person band of one man and one woman, playing piano and drums.  It seems like these bands should sound similar, but in fact, they could not really be too much farther apart on the musical spectrum.  The bands were the Dresden Dolls and Matt and Kim.  For the uninitiated, here is sample one and here is sample two.

To be totally truthful, I am a person who loves music and judges people by their musical taste, yet knows virtually nothing about it.  I can't carry a tune to save my life, I play musical instruments only adequately, and I can sing along to a song for years without ever noticing what it's about.  It's with some trepidation that I'm currently trying to write about music.  But I think music occupies the same particularly intense place for many of us.  We may not be able to speak with authority about key changes or album themes, but each of us has felt that moment where a song reaches right into you and touches something primal, despite whatever else might be going on at the time.

It's the sort of thing that comes up when you're standing at a concert amidst a group of people dressed as vampires and you're wearing an Ann Taylor Loft shirt and thinking rather critically that Amanda Palmer really shouldn't need a lyrics sheet to get through this show, when you find yourself feeling, deeply and profoundly, that giving in to all of your most melodramatic impulses would probably result in a more meaningful life.

Or you may be noticing that the median age of the other concertgoers is about 18 and you start to think, am I aging out of concerts?  Will all of my concerts after this be sit-down affairs where no one yells "Woooo!" after the exciting parts?  Am I too old to even be aware of what genre of music this opening act is?  (There was a lot of sampling, yelling random phrases, frenetic dancing, and neon clothing.  The whippersnappers around me got all into it, bopping around, probably thinking things like, "This band is part of the prog rock electronica grunge movement, but their sound hasn't fully evolved yet."  I tried some mild bopping, but mostly thought depressing thoughts about when I had stopped being a whippersnapper myself.)

And then Matt and Kim came on.  If you haven't attended a Matt and Kim concert, you are missing out on some of the most exuberantly brainless fun out there.  The crowd started jumping the minute they started playing and continued with only brief pauses straight through to the end.  Afterward, my old lady knees made it very clear that that had been a terrible idea, but in the moment?  How often do you really dance like no one's watching? 

You may not be a fan of either of those bands, but now is probably a great time to listen to that one song you've heard a million times before that still always makes you pause whatever you're doing, simply to think, "Exactly.  That is exactly how I feel. "