Dirty Projectors
I bought the tickets ages before and I had no idea why, since I didn't even like them much. I didn't even know that they had a whole bunch of albums before Bitte Orca.

The first support act was awful. They started promisingly enough, with a guy playing a bass clarinet, before a girl walked on and started singing some terribly generic piano pop. Fortunately the second was a nice indie-classical group that played Nico Muhly and St. Vincent, though by that point a lot of people had gone outside to buy drinks.

I'd read some criticism where people were saying that the male singer was off-key and "Using women as back-up singers is sexist!" but it really didn't come off that way to me. Longstreth is a better singer than most other wimpy indie frontmen I've seen, and there were plenty of female-lead songs. The bassist was not a woman for once!

I walked away thinking, "Hey, that was great!" while people around me were like "That was weird, where was the melody?" like a lot of other concerts I go to, and I know that a lot of them are just going to these things to pretend to be smart.

Also, I saw a guy wearing Crocs.

David Byrne & St. Vincent

I appreciated the songs from St. Vincent's 2nd album, which I thought was better than her new one. 

I didn't expect any Talking Heads because musicians are often like, "This is the new me, stop making me play old hits". And that's fine, but everyone leapt out of their seats at "Burning Down The House" and they finished with "Road To Nowhere". Unsurprising, since the audience looked pretty middle-aged.

Um, I'm not sure where I was going with that. It's been more than a month, so I don't remember much. However, I will always remember that old guy sitting and reading his phone while everyone was jumping and dancing to "Burning Down The House". But I won't complain anymore about other concertgoers...

Yeah, every "Best Albums of [timeframe]" list is dominated by men, and every time it happens, people have to write some hissy fit about it. But what if I just happen to like those white-boys-with-guitars bands more? And what if a whole lot of people, like the majority of people, share that preference? What can anybody do about that?

From what I've heard, most female artists sing pop songs about love, e.g. relationship failure. Girls listen to these songs when they are experiencing relationship failure. When I'm not feeling that, my reaction to sad ballads or whatever tends to be, "Ugh, shut up and get over it." I get annoyed with male singers too (Oberst, Gibbard, etc.), but most girl music is vocal/lyric-centric pop, whereas there are male bands that put vocals low in the mix, sing nonsense words, or are just plain instrumental, so I might not notice that they're being whiny.

It's a bit like the different types of tumblogs people have. Some are entirely devoted to those damned pictures with complaints or sappy quotes on them, or text posts about the friendzone. They are annoying. Others are more subtle, and post art or hipster photos that subtly show their general boredom with life. They are OK to follow.