I saw Anamanaguchi live for the first time in March and it was everything I could have hoped for on a night that was damn near a disaster.
Min and I assembled in Baltimore in front of a tiny club we’d never seen before. Sonar isn’t that far from the harbor. It’s a tiny club about the size you’d expect a band like Anamanaguchi and its 8-Bit Alliance traveling partners would be able to draw. Small and intimate. Scarily intimate, actually. I calmed myself by remembering that it’s rare for people other than myself to show up on time for a rock show.
No big deal. Grabbed a beer. Chatted with Min about stuff, including this girl I’d been out on a date with last week, Samantha, until the show started.
For all my love of the 8-bit music of my youth, I can’t say I’ve ever really been into chiptune music. It’s too much of a one-note gig, if you ask me. Why center your musical concept around a single gimmick? Wouldn’t it be better to integrate it with a legit rock band to turn it all up to eleven?
Most of the bands that night failed to capture Min and I for precisely that reason. How into it can you get at a show where the only thing the artist is doing is pushing buttons on his/her laptop or Game Boy? We were in the middle of being thoroughly unimpressed with the opening acts when I noticed that I had a voicemail from Samantha. This was bad.
Here’s the thing about budding relationships. There are norms that are set in their infancy. In this particular one we did most of our planning and communicating via text. Switching to phone calls could be good or bad, but the fact that I’d had our second date reneged on the week before meant that this could only be troubling news.
Really, how troubling could it honestly be? I’d known the girl for all of three weeks and really only been on one date, right? I mean, that’s what I told myself when I heard the voicemail that only confirmed what I already knew. I was a nice guy who did everything right, of course, but she wasn’t interested in dating me right now, which is really just about the nicest and worst things you could say in this situation because it means it’s out of my control.
So I stepped outside, called Samantha, had the embarrassing and slightly awkward conversation and went back in to see Min and tell him the bad news. Listening to mediocre music while telling myself and Min that it didn’t really matter when it clearly did was starting to prove too much for me. I couldn’t drink too much, because I had to drive, and I really didn’t want to be at Sonar listening to music either.
I’m glad I stuck it out that night. After three openers, Pete Berkman finally stepped on stage wearing a shirt emblazoned with a cat’s face and started engaging the audience with jokes and charisma that had been absent for most of the night. The set began and they rocked so hard my worries started to melt away. In between songs I even ran up to the stage and high-fived Pete.
After the set I took Min home and drove back down to my apartment. It had been a rough night, but I was able to smile just a bit because Anamanaguchi helped me forget about everything with an hour of white hot rock and roll.
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