THE STILLS
February 25, 2004
Troubador, Los Angeles, CA

The Stills released one of the best albums last year and I've been waiting for this show for several months. When I was first getting into the album I heard a show was announced for the Thrills and was super excited. I even went to www.thethrills.com to check the rest of the dates. Once the music started streaming from the site I realized that I'm an idiot and it was the Stills that I like. Ugg... A similar thing happened last year with Longview and Longwave.

The Troubadour is one of the best venue's in Los Angeles. Their site says they've been around since 1957 but I've never heard any stories about who's played there back in the day. Not like the Whiskey-A-Go-Go anyway. The greatest thing about the Troubadour is that you can fax in your order for tickets and only pay like two bucks service charge. So a pair of $ 12 dollar tickets only cost 28 bucks unlike Ticketmaster where they would've cost me 35 bucks!

The Stills came on a little after 10pm and played until 11:15. It was a pretty standard set which included the bulk of their debut album, 'Logic Will Break Your Heart'. I'm pretty sure that they opened with "Ready For It" and followed it up with the opening track on the album, "Lola Stars and Stripes". After that it gets a little blurry. They did play "Gender Bombs", "Changes Are No Good", "Of Montreal", "Let's Roll", "Allison Krausse" and probably my favorite song on the album, "Still in Love Song".

I wasn't familiar with their first song of the encore. It's not on the album and the lyrics were in French (they are from Montreal after all). They closed their set with an extended version of "Yesterday Never Tomorrow" with the drummer on vocals. The show ended just like the album with the single guitar strumming which was taped but still cool nonetheless.

Their visuals were pretty cool. During the first and last song of the set they just used the album artwork by scrolling a bunch of falling feathers. The rest of the set was backed by a bunch of animations that looked like chalk drawings. Plus they also had bits of lyrics scrolling across their backdrop.

What really gets me at shows is the band's attitude. I don't know why that is but I like it when the band's up there having a good time and the Stills seemed to really enjoy playing to the sold-out crowd. And I can't describe it but they really reminded me of seeing Adorable live. They don't really sound too similar but I just had that feeling watching them perform.