Asobi Seksu Acustic Session Live in Santa Barbara

The first show of 2010 and its Asobi Seksu, a band that I have always wanted to see live, but every time they play I am flying somewhere or getting a tooth pulled. The same goes for Mastodon. Needless to say I was PUMPED when I arrived at Soho, a night club in Santa Barbara, last night where Asobi Seksu took the stage. When I got there it was interesting…

So I get there late and Asobi Seksu has already taken the stage, I walked in on them covering Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions (Mazzy Star side project) song, Suzanne(my favorite song off of the album Bavarian Fruit Bread), fucking awesome! Then they go into another acoustic jam and front woman, Yuki Chikudate, informs the crowd how excited she is about touring doing acoustic songs in support of their acoustic album. Come again? I was expecting a show with instruments that need to be plugged into amps to create cool sound effects an feedback. Needless to say I was pissed, on all their albums they do a lot of electrical work and I was psyched….OUT that is.

The show was anything but bad though. It was cool to hear songs like Layers and Mahnome done with an acoustic treatment. At one point James and the rest of the boys leave Yuki on stage for some solo time with her and a grand piano. Since it was an acoustic show there was a lot of storytelling going on throughout their set. The best stage patter came from a solo Yuki where she went into a story about eating Mushrooms at Martha’s Vineyard, stumbling across an injured bird in the woods, going into town to save this wounded creature only to be told that there was nothing they could do to so James Hana(guitarist, singer, dude with a pretty cool mustache) had to run over it, and that’s what Blind Little Rain is about. James wrote it in his head during this fiasco and Yuki made sure to give James his creative props.

The band also had to battle an interesting crowd. First off there was still dinners and people being loud in the back of the bar, which was distracting as hell but that was nothing compared to the duel train wrecks that were frolicking in front of the stage. There were 2 older and very inebriated women in twirling around like retarded chimps on LSD. It was embarrassing to watch and that shit had my ribs all sorts of cracked up.

The set was on the shorter end but I realized something, I like acoustic shows. I got a chance to get down and talke some shit with Yuki at the merch booth at the end of the show. She was all of 5 foot nothing but a super sweet heart, its always fun to talk to an east coaster on the west end. James Hana was chilling at the mech booth as well but he was talking to some other cats.

The verdict

I was surprised they got this many slabs, they have turn this acoustic hater!

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