When I arrived to the venue there was a line formed infront of the building to get in. After getting my camera bag searched I made my way inside. A decent sized group of people had already lined the front row to catch the evenings opening act, Helvetia.

The Seattle trio used to many effects and the singer tried to play to many instruments at one time. He was attempting to play keyboards and guitar at the same time but his abilities fell short. The vocals were stale and their performance lacked energy and it was abvious that I wasn’t the only person who felt this way. I walked into the “studio” portion of the venue to sit and relax and as the band’s set continued more and more people made their way into the smaller portion of the venue.

After the group finished their forty five minute set the studio emptied and the ballroom became packed. Doug Martsch and company stepped on stage to take care of some last minute tunings. As the group started to play their first song a projector  started a slide show of artwork in the style of the group’s most recent album cover. The sound on the first song was kind of off. One of the guitarists asked the audiance if the sound was terrible, and then got the problem fixed.

The band played several songs off of their new album, You in Reverse and many of their older songs. After the sound was fixed the three guitar attack was tight, even during the extended jams throughout many of their songs.

The slide show continued throughout the show with subject matter ranging from abstract art to Lassy the dog. Doug Martsch swapped out dvds on the projector periodicly. The highlight of the projections came when the group played an instrumental song while a person on the screen gave a speech about enviromental activism. I found this to be classy and entertaining way of getting their message across, as opposed to just standing their and ranting inbetween songs.

During songs like “You Were Right” and “Big Dipper” the audiance was split into two categories; those singing their hearts out and those struck speechless. They ended their set with “Cary the Zero” from the album Keep it Like a Secret, although in the time between the normal set and the encore Doug never left the stage, he just played with the projector and swapped out dvds. The rest of the band returned to the stage to play the song “Perfect from Now on” which was the entire encore. Personaly I would have rather seen them end the show with a song like “Car”, but the musicianship onstage made up for any songs I wanted to hear but didn’t.