I Just Read About That…

[ATTENDED: October 8, 2019] The Head and the Heart

After being really impressed by Of Monsters and Men last month, I had pretty high hopes for being impressed by The Head and The Heart as well (because I get the two bands mixed up even though I like them both).

It was the same venue, although this time we had seats instead of the GA section.

It was nice to not worry about your location between acts.  But holy crap, the people around me sucked so bad that they ruined the whole night.  I am writing this ten days after the show and I hate to say that I am still annoyed by them all.

The people next to me came and went and came and went and came and went all while we were seated.

The guy in front of me was an old man (older than me even).  During Illiterate Light we thought it was cute that he and his wife (I assume) were videoing things and being adorable together.  Then during The Head and The Heart he stood up.  And was a freaking giant.  Worse yet, the people next to them didn’t come to the show, so they had a lot of room, which meant he spread out and stood right in front of me (and here I was excited about having empty seats in front of me).  He also filmed nearly every song, but rather than being discrete or considerate of the people behind him, he held yup his camera to his face which meant elbows out thereby blocking even more of my view.  His wife also filmed a lot but she apparently didn’t realize that phone cameras come with a flash, because it was on every time she took videos.  How it took the people in front of them six songs to actually say something (and they were very polite about it) I can’t imagine.

But the worst were the people behind us.  A loud row of eight loud talking, loud boasting, loud everything.  The craziest thing about them is that they were all huge fans of the band, they knew every word, knew when they played a “rare” song and sang along to just about every lyric.

I don’t really have a problem with people singing along.  When they do it well and everyone is a part of it, it’s really delightful now, if they sing very loudly right in your ear and are not very tuneful well that sucks.  And worse yet, if you love a band as much as they clearly loved this band, why did they feel the need to talk loudly to each other whenever they weren’t singing along?

They talked during introductions, they tale during instrumentals.  They even talked about what was coming up next in the song, “here comes the good part!”

What the fuck??  And you can’t shush a row of 8 people.

Meanwhile by the end of the show, the beer drinkers next to me were dancing–which is cute except that the dancing involved them breaking out of their seat zone and the dude bumping into me over and over.  I go to unseated shows and expect to get bumped into, it’s part of the turf, but if you paid for a seat, don’t steal someone else’s rented real estate.

God I hated everyone around me, expect poor S. who had the same ghastly experience.

So how was the music?

I went in with really high expectations, but things just seemed to want to plague this show.  The traffic sucked (although we did get good free parking).  As we crossed the street to the Met, a woman was also crossing and she was yelling “they stole my fucking $400!  They stole my iPad!”  Yikes.

The person who was going to seat us suddenly got called away and told us to stand in front of a pole to not block people’s views of the opening act.

Then there was some kind of emergency in the GA section after the first song.  Which meant a five minute delay!

All in all, I want to say I’m glad I wasn’t in GA as it was very crowded and full of very tall people, but given what I had to deal with I might have preferred the GA–at least you can move away (sometimes) from assholes.

Anyhow, the band came on and the set looked very pretty–lots of twinkling lights and a whole bunch of vertical slats which S. said looked like baleen (that was pretty spot on).  They opened with “Living Mirage” from their new album.

They were all wearing big hats.  Probably fedoras hats, but I’m not exactly sure. They don’t seem like a hat band, but whatever.

Jonathan Russell was out front and sounded great!  I noticed a little while ago that band member Josiah Johnson is on hiatus from the band.  Josiah Johnson recently played a solo show at a small club in Philly.  I didn’t go to that but it did make me wonder what his contributions to the older albums were–did he co-sing lead or did he take lead vocals on some songs or was he backing vocals?

Apparently Johnson has been replaced by Matt Gervais who is Charity Rose Thielen’s husband (she plays violin and sings).

We received a free copy (actually two) of the new CD and had been listening to it a bunch before the show.  I was pretty sure I knew the record quite well, but when they played a lot of the songs it wasn’t really until the chorus that the songs clicked in my head.  Maybe I was just too aggravated to get absorbed in the music,

But anyhow, the band sounded really good.  I thought that, like with Of Monsters and Men, the female singer, (Charity), would sing a lot more.  For some reason I just felt like she had a lot more vocal parts.  But she really doesn’t and, interestingly, whenever she sang, the crowd went kind of bonkers for her.

After they finished the first song, the crowd was motioning to the band/security.  Someone had apparently fainted and security came to attend to her.  The band stood there for a minute or so and then decided to leave the stage and stop being a distraction.

The delay took about 5 minutes and the people behind me were such uncharitable dickheads.  None of us know what happened to the person (who I believe was taken out on a stretcher) and they were impatiently calling for the band to come back on.

They did come back on and after telling everyone to be careful and look after each other they got on with the set.

Which meant playing a song off of the album I thought they didn’t play anything from.  “All We Ever Knew” was big and catchy with a big sing along “la la la” part.  I recognized it immediately so I must have heard it on the radio or something.  I had positive flashbacks to Of Monsters and Men with big fun singalongs and figured the band was going to be loud enough that the assholes behind me wouldn’t spoil it (although you can hear them talking in back if this clip, unbelievably).

Drummer Tyler Williams was pretty good at getting everyone hyped up for clap-alongs on some of the songs.

They played about 7 songs from the new album including the inescapable single “Missed Connection.”  Both of my kids have commented on how often they have heard this on the radio.

I was super psyched when they went back to their debut album to play “Ghosts.”  I really love Kenny Hensley’s piano sound that fills out this song and most of the songs on the debut album.  I think that’s what I miss most on the new songs–the jaunty piano has become a synth and it loses that old timey feel.

So it turns out that I really loved the first The Head and the Heart album (S. gave me that one for Christmas back in 2011).  I didn’t listen that much to the second album, although S. did and I heard it a lot when she had it on, so I guess I knew it pretty well.  I totally missed their third album (which is fine as they didn’t play much from it).  And then there’s the new one.  Their third and fourth albums are definitely more poppy and slick than their first two.  The song craft isn’t any worse, it’s just a  different overall vibe.  And I guess I like the earlier stuff a little more.

They followed that with two songs from the Let’s Be Still album.  I think “Let’s be Still” is beautiful and I was super happy they played it–even if people talked all the way through it.

Some of the newer songs rock a little harder like “Up Against the Wall.”  I love the little pop hook of the “no way, no way out” part.

Somewhere after this song I have lost all sense of the set.  I was frustrated by the tall guy, by the people behind me, by everything.  I started looking round to see if there was anywhere we could move to.

So I don’t really have a good sense of what they played in this middle section.  Shockingly, no one updated the setlist of Setlist.fm, so I’ve had to do it from my sketchy memory.

They played a song that the dude behind me said was a real rarity.  I don’t recall what it was, but I think he played a solo acoustic guitar and I sat down through it.

I was excited that they played a couple of older songs and I was able to lean one way or the other to see around the wall of a man in front of me.  I’m surprised I didn’t try to take a video during the older songs.  I must have been too beaten down.  I do recall him singing “The Glory of Music,” a song I don’t particularly like, and I feared that the rest of the show was going to be bad.

But then they played something like “Winter Song” and that got me out of my funk.  As did “I Found Out.”  Even though “Missed Connection” was the first single I feel like “I Found Out” is an even bigger, catchier song.

And then a great thing happened–the tall man in front of me had to sit for a bit.  And so I finally saw the whole stage uninterrupted for “People Need a Melody” a very pretty song, and the older song, “Gone.”  The violin solo in “Gone” is really very lovely.  Chris Zasche played bass behind Charity.  I can’t say as I was much aware of what he was doing,

They ended the set with the super catchy pairing of “Sounds Like Hallelujah” and “Down in the Valley.”  These two songs are great and worked really well as set enders.

I wasn’t sure how long this show would be.  Part of me just wanted to get the hell out of there, but I never miss an encore.  They played the catchy “Shake and then followed it up with “Rivers and Roads,” which I guess is their biggest hit?

It gives Charity a little spotlight although S. pointed out correctly that she sounds very different here than she does on record.

As soon as the song ended I knew that was it (I’d been checking other shows to see how many more songs there were) and we booked it out of there before saying something I’d regret.

So I had quite possibly the worst concert experience of my life at this show.  And I want to reiterate it had nothing to do with the band.  There may have been a song or two in the middle that I wasn’t too excited about, but overall, they sounded great, played some really fun songs and seemed to be really enjoying themselves.

I wouldn’t mind seeing them again to make up for this show, but I probably won’t.   I also feel like I never want to go to the Met Philly again.  I feel like it attracts the wrong crowd–rich people who are looking for a night out rather than fans of music.

SETLIST (possibly)

1. Living Mirage £
2. All We Ever Knew §
3. Missed Connection £
4. Ghosts ♥
5. Another Story ⊗
6. Let’s Be Still ⊗
7. Up Against the Wall £
8. Brenda £
9. Lost in My Mind ♥
10. See You Through My Eyes £
11. Honeybee £
12. Glory of Music £
13. Winter Song ♥
14. I Found Out £
15. People Need a Melody £
16. Gone ⊗
17. Sounds Like Hallelujah ♥
18. Down in the Valley ♥
    encore
19. Shake ⊗
20. Rivers and Roads ♥

£ Living Mirage (2019)
§ Signs of Life (2016)
⊗ Let’s Be Still (2013)
♥ The Head and the Heart (2011)