Present Joys

Last saturday, Dempsey and I went to see Mates of State at the Newport Music Hall, which is like a ten-minute drive from my house. There was an OSU football game that afternoon, though, for which I did not properly account. The traffic was terrible, of course! Even though we left with a half-hour to spare, the drive took much longer than I’d planned. We got forced onto the highway heading downtown and it was a giant pain to drive anywhere. Once we got to the Newport’s vicinity, we couldn’t find anywhere to park, either, because the parking garages’ entrances were all barricaded.

At this point, we’d already spent over an hour in the car and we both really had to pee. The traffic was so bad, we planned to just keep driving and go back home. We turned off High Street heading towards (just to get away from it all!) and ran into the parking lot for Indianola Presbyterian Church, which was mostly empty. I spoke to one person just leaving the lot. He very kindly gave me his parking pass, since it was still valid until midnight. Huzzah! Dempsey and I ran to the Newport, which was by now like 5 blocks away.

When we got to the Newport around 7:40pm, there were probably only 50 people there. It was really odd. More people trickled in over the next hour, but even so the crowd was definitely very small. I am sure the football game had something to do with this.

The opening band was called Other Lives. They were a five-piece band. There was one woman who looked interesting, but the other four were cliché, androgynous, hipster men. Their music was technically complex and instrumentally varied: everyone but the drummer played at least three instruments. They had guitars, glockenspiels, sleigh bells, cellos, violins, and a bunch of other things. The only problem with their music was that all the songs sounded pretty much the same. The Newport’s muddy sound system did not help things.

Dempsey and I were standing in the very front row on the left side of the room, so when Mates of State came on, we were so close to Kori’s keyboard that literally all we could see of her was her bottom half. But it was ok because we were so close and because we had a fantastic view of Jason.

The best part of the show was when they played a songs from Team Boo, which is, I think, the band’s greatest record. But the whole show was stellar. Honestly, when I first planned to go to this concert, it was more just because Mates had been one of my favorite bands when I was younger and because I’d always wanted to see them. But their newest album, Mountaintops, is a seriously great collection of songs and really rekindled my love for the band. The show made me love and respect them even more.

The setlist was a good mix of songs from the band’s four most recent albums. They played a lot of songs from The Re-Arranger: lots more than I expected. But even those were great and enjoyable. It was just generally a fantastic time. Mates played for about 90 minutes but the show seemed really short. This is probably because I was having such a fantastic time. I hope they come back because I would love to see them again.