Band of Horses--Live at Carnegie Hall

I saw these guys at Terminal 5 about a year and a half ago and it was a really good but inconsistent show. Tons of energy and they sounded great for an overflowing and adoring crowd, but they fucked up a couple of times. The worst was on one of the encores, the lead singer actually stopped the song about a minute in and they moved on to another song. I can't remember seeing that from a big pro band.

That kind of amateurism was on display again last night. Ben Bridwell somehow knocked the mic over at the start of a song and the sound guy had to run over and put it back into place for him. He kept struggling with his guitar strap, and the violinist (who was basically useless throughout the set) knocked into her mic or messed with her input and created a huge ugly sound several times.

All of those things were annoying and kind of comical and they might even be endearing because these guys are not jaded indie rockers who are just calling it in. There was real sincerity from these guys, they were totally psyched to be playing Carnegie Hall and most of the show was great. Highlights were "Monsters", "Weed Party", and "Detlef Schrempf". Some of these were reimagined version of the songs for the acoustic set up of the venue that made them more folky/country, like on "weed party". They started the encore with just the singer and guitarist on a subdued version of "Ode to LRC", which is usually a big powerful song, but that worked really well. The lowlight for me was their terrible change to "Window Blues", a really beautiful slow song that closes out their last album "Cease to Begin". They played it as uptempo country song and it was awful and sloppy. It reminded of when I saw Bob Dylan play one of my favorite songs "Don't think twice, it's all right" as a power ballad with his whole band and how that felt like heresy.

Still, pretty cool show and I had never been to Carnegie Hall before.