Merry Little Fancy Things

Caribou/Born Ruffians
Gainesville Common Grounds
October 13, 2007

There are three of them, they all look about fifteen years old, and from what little we caught of them the other night, Canadian trio Born Ruffians are pretty damn good. Before their last song, someone shouted a request, and the drummer said "We were going to play a different song, but it blows our mind that people know our songs in Florida, so we'd be stupid not to play what you asked for" and I thought that was very sweet. They play songs chock full of energy, with hand-claps and whoo-whoos and were six layers of fun. I even bought the CD! They played a song called 'This Sentence Will Ruin/Save Your Life', which was especially ace. Listen to a whole live set of theirs here and look out for an album early next year.

Dan Snaith, better known as Caribou, has some trippy visuals, and more importantly, two drumkits! Opening with 'Sandy' from his much-loved new record 'Andorra' [buy it], the band suffered from awful sound problems for the whole show. All of them at different times tried to get different levels adjusted, and the result was that vocals were very low and drums (two sets, remember) were really high in the mix. It was still all very enjoyable though - a little harder than on record. Lots of dancing, a couple of Manitoba tracks ('Crayon'!) and a brief encore. I'm not good with his song titles, so I can't give much more of a tracklisting, unfortunately. 'Melody Day' had the most recognition from the audience, of course, and saw more dancing. All in all, a good set but definitely hampered by poor levels.