Thanks to flagamuffin for reminding me about this. If you like the following then here's a shameless plug for the blog that I created, Crooked Haze. Another Hubski user, BrainBurner, also writes for it. His reviews and posts are great.

Let's get started on this with some background information. I had been in contact with the band Astronuatalis to get them into the radio station I work at for a studio session. My roommate was in contact with Why? for the same exact thing. We got to meet both bands and hang out with them both in our studio, and prior to their performance.

Let me preface this by saying that Andy Bothwell, otherwise known as the rapper in Astronautalis, is one of the most (if not the most) intelligent musicians I've ever met. His responses during our interview were so above and beyond anything I was expecting that it almost killed the interview really, I was so taken back trying to absorb what he was saying. Meanwhile, Josiah and Doug from Why? were the two people my roommate interviewed, and they too were very articulate but a bit more silly. Yoni was asleep and not able to join them. This was at around noon. Later that night, we went to show in the club side of a local venue. This was probably a 400 capacity place, and I would guess that there were 300 people there. The crowd was really cool, but it was interesting how there wasn't much of an overlap between people who were big fans of Astronautalis, and people who were big fans of Why?.

The first opener was Dream Tiger aka Liz Wolf, who is Josiah's wife. She had a sweet RnB thing going on, just her on stage with backing drums and bass samples being placed. She put on a mellow performance, and finished with a Janet Jackson cover that nobody recognized. All in all her performance was good, but nobody was into it that much due to not knowing her music.

Next up was Astronautalis, who came up out of the gate with a fired up, intense version on Contrails. Picture this at twice the intensity and that's what you get. The entire set was out of this world, the drummer broke his drumsticks at one point, and Andy was going all out during the performance. It was incredibly passionate, and he did a freestyle in the middle of it, which you can listen to here. To be able to put all that together on the spot is amazing. Honestly, his performance was the highlight of my night. Especially when my roommate and I got a shoutout from him during their set when he saw us. That was coolest. Met up with him after the show and bought a record and had him sign it. Seriously, these guys deserve more support and recognition.

Why? was the headliner for the night, and they killed it as well. It wasn't as fiery of a performance, but Yoni's stage presence is something to be seen. He's such a weird fellow, but you feel his emotions during every song. They were spot on with all the instruments, though there was some technical difficulties. Namely two XLR cables died during a couple of the songs and needed to be replaced, but they played it off well. The song selection was great, a lot of songs from Elephant Eyelashes and Eskimo Snow, which are my two favorite albums by them. Yoni joked with the crowd a lot, we got another shoutout, this time from Doug, and everybody in the crowd had a great time. The only downside to their performance was that they only did a one song encore. We talked to them after the show as well, and they're another band that deserves more support. From beginning to end this was an amazing show, one of the best I've been to in a while.