owclaw’s blog

Mae-be We’re Too Old for This

Let’s just say, heading into Sunday night’s Mae concert at the Fillmore at the TLA, we didn’t have the highest expectations. Former Phillyist and current SFist writer Spencer commented that he was less than impressed with Mae the couple times he’d seen him. Plus, we went to the show straight from doing our Barking Beauty Liveblog, and really, how could anything be better than that, right? On the plus side, one of our favorite bands, The Honorary Title, was the primary support; and, Mae’s latest album, Singularity contains some pretty solid music. So we tried to remain cautiously optimistic.

Bracket prediction

Still, the show made us feel old, and not because we were among the older people in the crowd. (We were, but the crowd didn’t bother us at all.) It was because the show was the end of an intensely busy weekend, and we’re realizing that we’re starting to get tired a lot faster than we used to. By the time Far-Less took the stage, we were already fading. Unfortunately, Far-Less didn’t do much to help us out. They played for about a half hour, and we’re not sure how many songs they played in their set, but it felt like it was simply one 30-minute song. And we were bored about three minutes into it. Once that was over, Between the Trees bored us with some super-generic emo. It was looking like it might be a really, really rough night.

Fortunately, the third band up was The Honorary Title. Having seen them before, we were pretty certain that we were in for a good set. And we were. There was a little glitch to start the set, as frontman Jarrod Gorbel’s microphone didn’t work, but once that got sorted out, the band was off and running. Unfortunately, as with our previous experience, the sound mixing left a lot to be desired. We’re starting to think maybe it’s time for them to look into getting a sound engineer. Still, the band’s talent is undeniable, and they seemed to strike a chord with the audience, as a large crowd flocked to their merch table once the set was over.

Finally came Mae, who took a sensory-overload approach to their show. The band had a large screen that flashed kaleidoscopes, images of cars driving down a highway, and seemingly random words as they played. It was a little bit much for us, and actually distracted a little from the music. Of course, that may have been because it was the end of a long weekend, and we just couldn’t take anymore brightness and loudness. As for the music itself, we’re going to have to respectfully disagree with our colleague Spencer, because we thought Mae had really strong chops. We like them a lot more than we’d expected to, and we prefer them live to the way they sound on album. If we hadn’t been so exhausted, we probably would have really dug the visual show they put on. But we guess we’re getting too old, and on a Sunday night, it was just a bit much.

Image by author.

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