Avett Brothers Concert Recap – Dallas, TX (4/30/08)

 The Avett’s working together in Dallas

The great crowd also enjoyed opener Matt Butcher (above) 

It was an amazing show, and I could sit here and try to give you a scholarly, extremely verbose analysis of not only the show, but what the music of the Avett Brothers truly represent in today’s current musical landscape and how it complicates people’s desires to forcibly place every act into a nice, neat little marketable package with a simplistic and catchy label to satisfy soccer moms all over the Midwest, but I won’t….

What I will say about how I felt during the show is this:  I felt like the skin of my face was being pulled off by broken banjo strings and I LOVED IT!!!  I have never quite understood the punk-rock comparisons that many people apply to the Avett’s until I saw them perform live Wednesday night.  Their CD’s are great, but the Avett’s, accompanied by a cello also on stage, turned these songs into Bill Monroe’s Red Bull-laced night terrors (again, I loved it).  If NOFX had scraggly beards instead of shaved heads and the occasional Mohawk, unplugged their instruments, they might make for a good Avett Bros. tribute band…if they really worked hard at it.

They tore through many of my fave tracks from Emotionalism.  “Paranoia in BB Major,” “Weight of Lies” and “DIe, Die, Die” were abundantly better and more lively than even the stellar versions on the CD itself.  Scott Avett proved to be a dynamic front-man as he jerked his head in rhythm to the beats he was pounding out on his awesome bass drum that was placed at his right foot.

I was there with Cindy from the Fine Line and her hubby Scott, who were also both impressed with the show, as well as the fact that Dallas showed up well for this hard working band from the east (there were clearly several hundred folks there by the time the Avett’s hit the stage).

Here is some video from the show that Cindy took…please enjoy your face being ripped off (again, in a very good way)….