Live review/news: Modest Mouse @ Music Hall of Williamsburg

(From my phone, of course. This time I actually meant to bring my camera and totally forgot.)

Ahhh, sleep! I finally got some. Yesterday morning I went to see Modest Mouse at Music Hall of Williamsburg, which was awesome, even if it wasn’t the best set list.

I got there at about 12:30 a.m. (doors were supposedly at 1 a.m.), but the box office was still waiting on the band’s guest list. So I waited around for a while and watched as the line to get in wrapped all the way to the end of the block and around the corner. The list didn’t get there until the venue already started letting people in, and once I got my ticket I still had to go allll the way to the end of the line (even though I was waiting longer than a lot of the people there). It took forever and a half to get in and it didn’t even look like everyone was going to fit in the venue, but alas, once I finally got inside, it didn’t even seem that crowded and I was able to get about four people from the front without even having to push.

The show was supposed to start at 1:30 a.m. but I didn’t even get in the venue until after that, and it took forever to set everything up, so they didn’t come onstage till about 2:30 a.m. There really was no room to move on that stage with six people and a bazillion instruments. It was way more crowded than when I saw Beirut there last month, and they have about 10 people in the band.

Last time I saw Modest Mouse was at Lollapalooza last year, and it was not so great. Obviously the festival setting usually takes away from the band’s performance but I just remember it being pretty boring. Before that, I saw them about four years ago at the Royal Oak Music Theater in Royal Oak, Mich., for the “Good News For People Who Love Bad News” tour, which was amazing, since it’s a small-ish standing-room-only venue (1500-2000ish capacity) and I was pretty close to the stage.

They played until 4 a.m., when the venue said they were out of time, which meant no encore. Also, I thought the last two songs were the worst (not because I hate the songs but one was too slow for staying awake at almost 4 a.m., and the other didn’t really wake me up either), so I was pretty bummed about the ending.

I went home and started writing, saw it get light outside around 5 a.m., slept from 5:15-7:15 a.m., then got up to write some more and go to work because my story was due at 11 a.m. Ohhh, journalism.

Anyway, my story (not really a review, it ran in the news section) for Billboard is here.

Modest Mouse’s setlist:

“Trucker’s Atlas”
“Breakthrough”
“Fire It Up”
“Dance Hall”
“Dashboard”
“Dramamine”
“Satin in a Coffin”
“Wild Packs of Family Dogs”
“Tiny Cities Made of Ashes”
“Little Motel”
“Paper Thin Walls”
“We’ve Got Everything”
“Blame It On The Tetons”
“The Good Times Are Killing Me”