I ate dinner at the Bambuddha lounge.  The Halibut was incredible.  I can’t remember why I stopped going there.  Even the Décor is top notch:  Modern, yet relaxed.  That’s a hard trick to pull off, I think, but what I know about Interior design couldn't fill a small something-or-other.

BTW, I never did get a date for the show. No, I didn’t try Banana Republic.     When I sat down for dinner at Bambuddha there was over eight girls at the Bar and no men to speak of.  I sat next to the one in a wife beater with a Proposition stamped across the front.  She had great taste in music (The only Furnace Fan I have ever met, actually), works for a local Radio Station, and wears an Old-Navy Jacket.   And I still had an extra ticket…..   Could I wrestle a mangled victor from the crooked, slobbering maw of defeat?  No.

But I’m going to the show anyway, damnit!

Fiery Furnaces opened up right on time at 11:15.  Eleanor comes on stage and from where I was standing --dead center back row,The neck of Rich’s Golden Triangle-- she looked a bit like Lloyd’s depressed friend from “Say Anything”: I expected her to start singing “Joey Lies when he Cries”. She’s got a feathered mop.  Mathews mop was unmolested. The basist and I were overdressed.

The first fifteen minutes of the show was all punk energy. All their meandering songs were condensed and strung together in a shotgun medley. She probably played bits from six of them, including Straight Street and ‘lost my dog’, before taking a breath and a drink of water. They sounded good, but they had squeezed all the air out of the songs. No one even knew she was playing Straight Street until she sangd “But I got there too late”, but by then if was of course too late.

I was thinking that this is good but not what I had hoped for.

But while she was taking that drink the band stretched out and you could feel the show start to change.  The drummer started playing the stems of his is cymbal kit during a protracted opening to a song and the next fifteen minutes was more representative of the BlueBerryBoat, with its shifting, meandering movements.  Unfortunately the crowd did the Standing Still the whole time. I tried yelling “Arrgghh!” like a pirate during the Pirate scenes, because Pirates are AWESOME.  I guess no else had thought of that one yet.

For the last 15 minutes they sent half the band off and played some of their stuff off their first album.

The whole show was shorter than their last album. I was hoping for a hi-fi, PJ Harvey like dramatic concert. Instead it was more straight-ahead post-punk New York Rock Concert, albeit with an energetic keyboard section.  It was a good show, but not Pirate good.