Last night we went to see Neko Case at Neumo’s.

Click the pic for more blurry pix. I shot a fair amount of video, too. I’ll link to the clips here; they are all in quicktime format.

The show opened with the out-of-place on the bill Dexter Romweber, a true southern madman, who was in fine form. Despite this, his appearance befuddled the crowd, who were not expecting a guitar assault of such intensity. Romweber’s best known project is the Flat Duo Jets, and here is an interview with him about his career.

Here’s a 25-second clip (2.3mb).

The second band (and Neko’s backing band) was Canada’s alt-country brother act, The Sadies. They are technically polished, but the difference in aesthetic between Romweber and their approach was too great, for me, and in Romweber’s favor. The cool precision of the brothers’ vocal harmonies and dual-lead sound is deeply rooted in rock acts of the early seventies.

Here is 47 seconds of a Sadies song (4.4mb).

I shot a lot more video of Neko than of the other bands. We were right up front for the whole show, and it was lovely. I should note that the polish of the Sadies is an appropriate setting for Neko’s towering, transcendant voice.

Here are the clips:

A false start (4.6mb, 48 seconds).

The opening song (22.2mb, 3m54).

Third clip (12.3mb, 2m10).

Fourth clip (.6mb, 7 sec).

Fifth clip (3mb, 32 sec).

First encore (21.5mb, 3m46 ).

Second encore (12.8mb, 2m15).

I haven’t taken the time to track these down by song title, sorry. It took long enough to rotate them and color correct them in Final Cut Express. If one of you lovely interauts wants to, I’ll happily edit the post to add the info.

Say, I should probably look into BlogTorrent for this stuff, eh?