John Vanderslice/Bishop Allen - The Empty Bottle - 10/6/2007

I keep forgetting to bring earplugs with me, but I decided that I need to start taking preservation of my hearing a little more seriously, so last night was first show I went to "plugged" in a while. It took a little while to get used to it again, and I kept pulling them out to make sure I wasn't getting cheated.

I've been a Bishop Allen fan for a while since I first heard "Things Are What You Make of Them" in the preview for Mutual Apprciation. And I know they play in Chicago quite a bit, but I always seem to have something else going on. So when I found out that they were opening for John Vanderslice, I was pretty close to overjoyed.

Bishop Allen was fun. Every lead has his/her own stage presence, and Justin Rice's is twitchy and piercing. His eyes have a little deer-in-headlights look to them when he plays, and boy does he sweat. The rest of the band seemed to be having fun too.

John Vanderslice. I was immune to him until "White Dove" showed up on a Paste Sampler a couple months back. Apparently he's got a but of a cult following - and although the club wasn't sold out, there were quite a few people there who were excited abou "JV" as they call him. Good set - the bass player's dancing cracked me up. In the midsection, JV dismissed one player at a time, until it was just him bringing on a barreling version of "Numbered Lithograph" one of my favorite tracks from Emerald City. They played well on the catchy songs like "White Dove" but I was also excited to see the passion that they put into less-accessible tunes like "tablespoon of codeine."

Both Bishop Allen and JV mentioned numerous times how happy they were to be in Chicago. I was starting to thing that JV's stage banter was a bunch of bs when he started singing about having a dance party after the show. But he wasn't, and in lieu of an encore, he and the band jumped down into the audience for a sing-along of one of their songs that everyone in the place save me, Jill, and Chris knew the words for. And then they turned on some hip hop and busted a move with the fans. Pretty unexpected and fun.