we're off to new jersey

to celebrate birthdays as well as days of mothering.

which is one reason (spoiler alert: confession time approaching) we skipped out on El Perro Del Mar's set tonight at the Bowery Ballroom.

see, doors opened at 8, there were three acts, so anyone with even an associates degree in live music management knows that the first band (assuming solo female with acoustic guitar can be called a band) is on by 9 and hopefully off by 9:30, 9:45 at the absolute latest.

and since act two (Lykke Li - see above) was not overwhelming with instrumentation (which wouldn't have been a problem anyway given the sparse set up of performer one), they should've been on no later than 10.
which is still pretty late, esp. since the floor was packed (yeah, sometimes you delay the opener so they can actually play to some people, but the floor was packed).

we arrived in the 9:30 range, heard maybe four, five songs (by Anna Ternheim, btw), including a interesting enough cover (remember: female, acoustic guitar) of David Bowie's "China Girl." and not having much Lykke Li experience I was assuming (hoping) that El Perro would be next (you know, long subway ride home (re-routes beginning at midnight), sink full of dishes to be washed before leaving, packing to do), but alas.

it soon became evident that El Perro would not grace the stage until 11 at the earliest (the earliest). meaning that her set wouldn't end until midnight (at the earliest). and did I mention the subway re-route (51 minutes on your best day), the dishes and the packing?

and did I mention the floor was completely full of patrons?
no room at the inn?

(seriously, we were up in the balcony for most of it. no way we could see (and that's part of it, right?))

so we cut out. left. scrammed.
saw an unfortunate cluster of folks waiting on the 7 train to Flushing piled thick at Grand Central, then re-routed ourselves.

home by midnight.
dishes/packing done by 1.
but no El Perro.

(and yeah, I know they're both young, female and Swedish, but the line-up is peculiar in that Lykke Li is belting out songs like "Dance, Dance, Dance" and El Perro's most recent album is church organ-dominated ponderings of life after death and what does it all mean. I'm guessing the word "buzzkill" was uttered on Delancey Street at least twenty times between midnight and 1)

I took pics (lots of good ones, he said with surprise in his voice) of Panic at the Disco's show at Roseland Wednesday night and Harvilla ran three alongside his blog (I'm also embarassingly, yet accurately quoted spewing words my nieces and nephews should never hear me utter). and if you somehow have managed to escape my recent Breeders penmanship (come on, it's been in like four papers already), the medium-sized version makes an appearance in Kansas City's Pitch this week.

happy mother's day eve eve.