At rock nyc, we have written more than a few times about Saint Motel, and I got the chance to see them again on Sunday afternoon as they were headlining Tarfest. After a long sound check – it seemed there were some serious problems with the sound – the quartet, in their usual white-shirt-skinny-jean outfits, opened with their now famous ‘Eat Your Heart Out’ and it was only the start of their inventive sonic firework.
The front of the stage was packed with young people, especially girls, and many started dancing as soon as they played their dance-numbers ‘You Do It Well’, and ‘Do Everything Now’. The band did not let the difficult beginning affect their usual playful style, and singer A.J. Jackson was joking between songs, as they were browsing the catchy pop tunes from their first release ‘Forplay’.
You can always count on the LA quartet for putting on a great show, everybody was having fun, Aaron Sharp, A.J. Jackson, Greg Erwin and Dak Lerdamornpong were as energizing and exhilarating as ever, playing their charismatic number with ease, but reworking some of their songs a bit, ‘Butch’ being much slower than the original, and ‘Dear Dictator’ starting with a heavy and dark introduction before going on with its usual hard-beating-glam rock.
There were some shredding, lots of crazy moves, and even an encore! They played their bouncy Brazilian-Calypso-patchwork-y new song ‘Puzzle Pieces’, soon to be turned into a video, and which definitively was a crowd pleasure, and also a new song, that will ‘be put on record soon’.
The band has being doing a lot of these theme shows lately, from their annual Valentine Zombie’s Prom, to a Judgment day show last May,… there was only the music on Sunday, but A. J. made an allusion to the history of the place, talking about dinosaurs, since the festival was happening at La Brea Tar pits, a park with asphalt pits where excavation of prehistoric animals has been going on for more than a century. But no, there are no dead dinosaurs in that place! It’s way more recent than that,… I know, the theme of ‘Jurassic Park’ played during the sound check didn’t help, …but sorry I digress…
Set list:
Eat Your Heart Out
You Do It Well
Do Everything Now
At Least I Have Never
(New Song)
Butch
Puzzle Pieces
To My Enemies
Dear Dictator
Encore:
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