Just got back from seeing the Beauty Pill and the Travis Morrison Band play a free show on campus.

The Beauty Pill had kind of fallen off my radar since their 2001 debut EP, The Cigarette Girl From the Future, but their record, The Unsustainable Lifestyle, is pretty good. Unlike a lot of their contemporaries, they use rhythm the way a lot of the original post-punk bands did (e.g. Gang of Four) and it made for a particularly energetic set. At one point the band's new female lead vocalist/keyboardist Jean Cook began playing a rhythm line on the bottom of a frying pan, which everybody seemed to like. I would've liked to hear more from them, but you've got to know when to get out of the big dog's way.

The Travis Morrison Band (apparently Morrison's career as a purely "solo" artist didn't last long) took the stage and TravMo himself was promptly given a small stuffed frog by somebody at the front of the crowd.

His new solo debut, Travistan, was a disappointment to me, but the live version is pretty exciting, especially in a small venue. They played two new songs, "As We Proceed" and "I'm Not Supposed to Like You (But I Do)," and many of the poor decisions of the album were rethought on stage, with the end result a much fuller and more interesting sound. Morrison's stage presence is still weird, full of squinty faux smiles, but whatcha gonna do?

Their encore was Morrison's unfairly and very overly derided cover of Ludacris's "What's Your Fantasy?," complete with Morrison briefly necking with some guy near the stage. Somehow this song, out of all of them, balanced the ironic and sincere in the way I thought they'd been trying for and missing most of the set.