at Moore Theater

As we located our seats at the beautiful Moore Theater Thursday night, my friend turned to me and said "If anyone starts chanting 'Keane! Keane! Keane! Keane!' I'm totally leaving. I'll bet we're in for at least one session of overhand clapping in unison too." It's easy to be cynical about Keane at this point in their career, as they're not revered in indie rock circles as much more than Coldplay-lite (and Coldplay is pretty damned "lite" already, right?). But you know what? I think Hopes & Fears was a damned fine record and I don't care who knows it.

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Guh. Okay:

Pretend it's the winter of '04-'05. Ready? Go.

I don't know what you were up to, but I was geeking out about shows and posting really, really bad pictures I was taking with my point-and-shoot on my blog (that all of six people were following). My heavy rotation of new music included I'm Wide Awake It's Morning, Emoh, Hopes and Fears, a Barsuk comp, anything involving Colin Meloy or Ray Lamontagne, The Wrens, The Frames, Andrew Bird, Iron and Wine, Damien Rice, Ed Harcourt, and David Garza. Plus some live acoustic Howie Day bootlegs from way before he got awful. At this point, I'd been hip to KEXP for about six months or so, I was drooling over the content on three imaginary girls, and my BFF was trying to get me to move out to the West Coast.

I also had a really, really crappy mp3 player.

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at The Showbox

As openers, The French Kicks set the bar exceedingly high. In fact, too high for Keane to match. Secretly, I like it when this happens.

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With only piano, keyboards, drums, bass, and the highly expressive vocals of Tom Chaplin, this three-piece concocts glamorous, full-sounding tracks imbued with bittersweet beauty.

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