Present Tensed

Andrew Bird, Cake, Talib Kweli, & The Cool Kids (Summer Breeze @ UCHICAGO, 5/17/2008)

Back in the day, the day being the mid-90s, we were always guar­an­teed bright sunny skies for the UofC’s annual Sum­mer Breeze con­cert. Not so these days, as the sec­ond half of Sum­mer Breeze was marked by a steady light rain which led to a sur­pris­ingly large num­ber of oth­er­wise smart kids falling (some­times in spec­tac­u­lar fash­ion) down a muddy hill.

I’d never seen the Cool Kids [songza] per­form before, and was impressed. They’ve built up a very strong rep­u­ta­tion for putting on a great live show and didn’t dis­ap­point. I’ve been lis­ten­ing to “Totally Flossed Out” for the past two weeks and am look­ing for­ward to their new album “The Bake Sale”.

Andrew Bird took a break from record­ing his new album (and writ­ing his insight­ful NYTIMES blog) to play a long set. He played two new songs, the sec­ond of which (name I can’t remem­ber) was as good as any­thing he’s ever done. Oth­er­wise, it was a good mix­ture of “Arm­chair..”, “Mys­te­ri­ous Pro­duc­tion…” and “Weather Sys­tems…”. I’m now at the point where I’ve seen Andrew Bird per­form ~8+ times over the last 7 years, and sim­ply enjoy the slight vari­a­tions from per­for­mance to per­for­mance. You really need to get one of his last three albums and then catch him performing.

I’ve seen Talib Kweli per­form before — with Juras­sic 5 in 2002 and maybe a walk-on with the Roots around the same time — but never on his own. It would be an under­state­ment to see he’s a top-flight emcee. Under­state­ment! I haven’t given his last two solo albums much of a lis­ten, but have been thor­oughly enjoy­ing his “Lib­er­a­tion” col­lab­o­ra­tion with Madlib. I also con­sider his “Reflec­tion Eter­nal” album with Hi-Tek and his “Black Star” work with Mos Def to be essen­tial hip-hop albums.

Finally, Cake took the stage amidst a dri­ving rain and had the good humor to open their set with “it’s com­ing down”. Their humor was short-lived as John McCrea really seemed to be irri­tated with the hor­ri­ble weather (hm, rain and light­ning with them on a tiny metal stage), and inter­mit­tent tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties with the elec­tri­cal gui­tars and gen­eral tun­ing shenani­gans. They han­dled the bad con­di­tions pretty well. Cake is one of those bands who’s songs are much more well known than you’d guess, which makes their shows alot of fun. Sadly, I didn’t make it through the rain to the end of the set, opt­ing to leave after “Sheep go to heaven, Goats go to Hell”.

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