Despite doors being pushed back from 7:00 to 8:30, I was pleasantly surprised with Star Course’s professional demeanor. Previously, Star Course has brought Sonic Youth, Weezer, and the Pixies throughout their lifetime as a student organization. Those bands are personally more appeasing than ones they’ve gotten in recent years, but I can’t complain. The show was overall really fun, especially for being a Wednesday night.
The
night started off with The Mynabirds. The main vocals reminded me of Fiona Apple which was nice, but their songs were more or less pretty boring. Overall they were alright. Nothing too special going on. They had a cellist that only played half of their songs, which was kind of weird. I would have liked to see her play more. I’ve seen bands much more boring than this open a show before.
I had never seen Bright Eyes before, let alone a show in Foellinger Auditorium. I thought overall the vibe of the show was very strange, maybe it’s because I’ve taken a class in Foellinger or maybe it was just that the show was awkward. Bright Eyes was a little disappointing. I’ve never seen a professional musician mess up as much as Conor Oberst did. I think he was drunk, but the performance definitely suffered because of his mess ups. Everyone else in the band was pretty spot on. I’m not the biggest Bright Eyes fan in the world, but I definitely could tell when there were mistakes. Their set was full of past and present Bright Eyes’ songs. They played a good chunk of the new album as well as some old songs; the highlight of the set was probably when they played “Lua.” As for the encore, it was completely unneeded in my opinion. It was sloppy and the songs weren’t the best picks for an encore. They ended up having to restart the very last song too, for whatever reason.
The sound in Foellinger was pretty good. It wasn’t very loud, but it was perfect for the band and the setting. I sat in the balcony the entire show and had a great view, and enjoyed myself. Big props to Nick Bethune, Tim Reynolds, Michael Cunningham, and the rest of the Star Course crew for putting on a great show. Now if only they could get Sonic Youth to come play in the fall…