Pale Young Gentlemen "Me & Nikolai" (17.6 MB) from Pale Young Gentlemen Carol Rennebohm Auditorium, Music Hall Madison, WI November 9, 2007

After getting no footage of Tokyo Police Club due to my own foolishness, and then waiting out a drought of local shows, the Madison Pop Fest returned this weekend to quench my musical thirst. But oh, Pop Fest, my love-hate relationship with continues apace.

There were four bands that I kind of wanted to see on the Pop Fest schedule, two on each night, and all in Music Hall's Carol Rennebohm Auditorium. The trouble is that I was on a huge project deadline all week and got almost no sleep Thursday night before a full day of Friday meetings. When we got to Music Hall for the scheduled 10:15 set by Pale Young Gentlemen and the previous set was just starting, I could already feel myself not making it all the way through. How a show like this can get an hour off schedule so quickly is a mystery for the ages, I suppose, as is the question of how backdrops and strung lights can come crashing down from the rigging so easily, but the upshot is that I simply could not stay awake past midnight and had to miss the Baby Teeth that followed the PYG's. This was unfortunate since I really wanted to see them again and had even indicated as such to their frontman, Abraham Levitan; also it's a pretty cool auditorium and I'd've liked to have stuck around just in general. But instead I had to half-consciously leave, along with all the other tools without the decency to stick around for the touring act that followed their friends on stage. Hopefully what looked like a mass exodus after the PYG set was just people going outside to smoke and Baby Teeth got a decent reception; listening to their new album a bunch last week reminded me of how really solid they are.