we love the mae shi

We do. Jake and I. Both of us. For good reason(s). That's one of the topics I can post about.

But first, in response to Jake's first post, I don't have anything "planned" and he knows it. This is technically his blog, not mine, and he just told me to post alongside him so his grammar looks better, his thoughts look more profound, and people think he's more popular than he is.

I will not write about music all the time. If you know us at all (and, as he mentioned, you do) you can rest assured such popular topics as pedophilia, suicide, my dog, and gay porn will all come up at some point too.

Back to The Mae Shi, I went to see them Sat. (6/2) at the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco upon Jake's suggestion (as you'll see, all this gets pretty self-referential. I don't have that many friends. Not like Jake. Did you catch his use of the word "variedly"?).
They played before The Mall who went on before Matt and Kim. The Matt and Kim part seemed totally incongruous, but I can't comment on that because I left before they went on. More on being old and jaded in future entries. I mention the order because there were a ton of people there anyway. That sort of thing just reinforces my preference for San Francisco audiences over New York ones.

I will not spend too much time talking about how great the Mae Shi were, but they did a lot of things right. They just sort of emerged out of the audience for the first song, which they all sang while walking around us without mics or anything. I am a huge sucker for bands in which everyone sings (see Jake's upcoming post on Grizzly Bear), as well as for bands who appear to be having an incredible time when they're playing, like they couldn't possibly be doing anything else because it just wouldn't make sense. It was loud, and that felt good. People clapped during the songs without encouragement, and sometimes made weird loud noises (also a good sign). The transition to the new singer (who is called Jonathan) was fairly seamless as far as I could tell, being just a random audience member who never saw them with the old singer (who is called Ezra), but who has two of their records and was fairly curious to see how that would turn out.

Also of possible note: at some point Jonathan got to mess around with that synth they made that responds to bright lights. Cool. Plus, they changed into (and out of) all white outfits at some point during the set, making this the second time this weekend I've seen band members change on stage. What's the deal with that?
One concern though, are they making a lot of religious references? This makes me uncomfortable.

Thanks to Leslie Hampton for the photo. More can be found at her Flickr site