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The Bats, The Guillemots, and Dear Nora The Rickshaw Stop, home of the über-pretentious Club ID, is almost too comfortable. Veronica and i arrived at 9:15pm for the evening's show. We had planned on missing the openers, but it seems the 8pm start time was pushed back to 9 so we entered only minutes into the first band, Dear Nora. Not terribly thrilled with their drawn out, instrumental sound and fairly grating vocals, we set about finding a place to stand. Veronica thought to look on the upstairs balcony, and lo we found a very comfy velvet couch completely unoccupied. We chatted through the rest of Dear Nora. The second act, Brits the Guillemots (which i insisted on mispronouncing "the Guillermos"), were slightly more interesting, but by this time Veronica had settled into a half hour nap and i was involved with my game of Bejeweled on my cell phone. Their intro scared the hell out of me, as a few of the band members played an instrumental buildup, paving the way for the very noisy arrival of the rest of the band from the balcony ... right next to us. V woke up midway through their set, which to be honest was interesting but not enough to pull me away from the couch. We had a brief conversation with a drunken new friend and Kiwi music enthusiast, discussing down under music from the Gordons to the Clean to the Go-Betweens. By the time the Guillemots left the stage, V and i agreed to head downstairs and try to regain consciousness. We took up a spot only ten feet or so from the stage, and miraculously found another two open chairs. That eased the wait as the Bats prepared. Around 11pm the Kiwis took the stage, and launched into "Supernova" from 1995's Couchmaster. A set of four completely unpretentious New Zealanders (really the antithesis of the aforementioned club, also held at the Rickshaw), the band carried on a modicum of amicable conversation with the crowd, but mostly stuck to belting out hook-laden indie pop. Using equipment borrowed from the Guillemots, they encountered a few technical problems (a buggy distortion pedal wreaked havoc with volume and overdrive on a few songs), but succeeded in capturing the simple enchantment of their albums. The set spanned their almost twenty year career, from 1987's debut masterpiece Daddy's Highway ("Miss These Things", the hypnotic encore closer "North by North", "Block of Wood") to 2005's reappearance At the National Grid ("Single File", "Horizon", "Bells", and the haunting "Mir" sung by Kaye). Also included were gems from Couchmaster (the opener "Supernova" and "Land 'O' Lakes") and the wonderful "Boogey Man" from Fear of God. Despite the "too late for Ted" 1am end of the show, it was a very worthwhile Wednesday night. It's not every day that a seminal New Zealand jangle pop band makes it to a small club in San Francisco, so i'll suffer a little lost sleep.
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