Darcy and I have been fortunate enough to see some great shows this year; Radiohead was amazing and The Black Keys were fantastic. Last night we went to the Wamu Theater to see The Jack White Band ... er, The Raconteurs. And, they were ok. The five members of the band sure bring a heck of a lot of energy to the show, and they are obviously extremely talented musicians. Jack White is the center of attention, but that is a good thing. He has an amazing stage presence and I felt drawn into the music. They sounded good, and the stage set was minimal which I thought fit nicely with the band (there was no need to add extra visuals).
Now for the negative. Wamu Theater is not a great place to watch a show. There is a lot of concrete and it is rather large so I felt like I was in a warehouse and not a theater. That is kind of disappointing because I think that The Raconteurs would have been much more at home in a place like the Paramount. They played a very short set - around an hour - and then an encore of about fifteen to twenty minutes. And, this is probably the thing that I disliked the most, they made the crowd wait during the "encore break" for what seemed like 15 minutes. I personally do not understand the encore. It seems like a lot of ego boosting on the part of the band. The band knows that they are coming back out (the guitar techs were retuning for crying out loud) and the crowd knows that they are going to hear more songs. At the very most, leave the stage and return quickly - especially if you had just wrapped up what I consider a short set. I like the way that the Pixies did it: they did not even leave the stage, they just took a short break to acknowledge the crowd and then continued playing. Or, Pearl Jam: they left after a long set to take a break and came back on to "play the second half of the show".
Ok, enough complaining and sorry about the punctuation / grammar/ run-ons. I am programmer not a writer.
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