My second favorite band ever is on tour and came through my part of the world, playing at the incredibly wonderful Michigan Theater in a little suburb of Ypsilanti I like to call Ann Arbor. The show was, as I usually expect from TMBG, excellent.
Opening for them was a duo from Belfast, Ireland called Oppenhemier. Poppy, synthesizers (and they must have had a sequencer in there somewhere, because there was more music than two guys could play). They were pretty good, and I'm not just saying that because they had a air horn solo during one of the songs. I picked up their CD after the show, and look forward to giving it a good listening soon.
TMBG did a nice set with three encores, a mix of stuff from their new album The Else and other stuff. They pulled out, as they put it, "some old chestnuts&uot;, so we got to hear stuff like XTC vs. Adam Ant and Spy. A feature new to this tour is "Jerry Orbach from Beyond the Grave", which reminds me that I should have a Jerry Orbach movie night. The best part of the show, in my opinion, was the third encore (Istanbul, Not Constantinople), especially the opening guitar solo done by Dan Miller. Acoustic, started off sounding almost classical and working up to a frenzy before opening the song.
Random photos from the show (and damn, I forgot to take a picture of the Michigan Theater Marquee after I left) can be found here. Not bad, considering I was taking them from the balcony.