The day after Christmas, when one may ordinarily assume that most individuals would still be with their family or spending this day working after having the prior day (Christmas) off. My assumption would be that seeing Past Lives would not be on the agenda for anyone to do on the 26th of December, but I am often wrong.

Family time? Sounds lame! Seeing Talbot Tagora and Past Lives play? Sounds awesome!

This show was the last show of two-thousand-and-nine at Healthy Times Fun Club. The idea that surrounded the planning for this show was it was to be fairly “chill-out” with not much stress on time constraints. The only other band sharing the bill with Past Lives for the night was Talbot Tagora, whose this would be their last performance before their indefinite hiatus while members endeavor for a higher education.

Both bands were incredibly excited to play. The overall let’s “chill-out” plan was a success when Past Live had a knock-out performance. When you give a band enough time to setup and the only pressure is a not-so-antsy audience, then it can either go two ways: The band get sluggish about setting up and playing or their relaxed enough to play a brilliant set.

The amount of people at this show was thick. The only ways I could have seen Past Lives play was by somehow pushing my way through the crowd to the very front or by standing on an already occupied couch (see photo). Fortunately this amount of people dampened the sound coming from the stage enough that I could more clearly hear what was being sung. There was an absolutely great balance of sound and the mixture of raw vocals (no reverb or delay) with their art-punk-dance (whatever you call it) songs were absolutely brilliant. There’s a very admirable aspect of Jordan Blilie not caring about masking potential ill-tuned singing and screaming; a quality of not being embarrassed or insecure about the notes you hit while singing.