Seattle’s all-ages concert guide You don’t need fake ID to have fun.

This concert is the farthest I have ever gone for a show (excluding Sasquatch) and it was well worth the drive. Having followed the developments in their tour schedule, I was dissapointed to hear that they were only playing a 21+ show in Seattle aside from an instore at Sonic Boom which just wasn’t good enough for me.

The show was way up north in Anacortes at The Department of Safety. The venue was absolutely astounding. It was small, comfortable, and extremely low-key. There were couches lining the back wall of the old fire department garage with about 16 seats on the...

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Since, sadly, our beloved Architecture in Helsinki played a 21+ show at the Chop Suey Sunday night, most of our staff had to be content with an in-store at Sonic Boom records. Luckily, ZachHale made his way to Anacortes for their other Washington show, which was all ages, and was, he said, amazing. At Sonic Boom, AIH played a cheery, brief set including most of our favorites and enough to leave us happy.
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This last Saturday was the annual Sasquatch music festival held over in eastern washington at The Gorge. Both ZachHale and Justine-Marie were lucky enough to make it over there, and the rest of staff were, well, jealous. Zach, who saw more of the festival than Justine, wrote the bulk of this article, with Justine filling in some details here and there.

ZachHale says:
Having been to the absolutely incredible lineup last year I had extremely high expectations and was ready to be let down. I didn’t end up arriving until about a half hour before A.C. Newman played at the Wookie Stage (the second largest stage) and so we went and watched Ray Lamontagne on the mainstage for a bit.

I hadn’t planned...

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You know those shows, usually on a sunny afternoon or a big vacation weekend, where maybe fifty people show up to a venue that holds 200, and the show is totally boring and the crowd is dull and the bands are kinda depressed nobody’s there? This wasn’t one of them.

Okay, so the Vera was the emptiest I’d ever seen it, but that didn’t stop this show from being incredibly fun. Aside from our very fun interview with The Cops, the show itself was great. The Vera is air conditioned, which was bonus number one. As for the music, the bands were all very high-energy, the crowd was dancing, and the music was solid and exciting. Basically, dear readers and friends, you missed out. There was room for you, but oh well. We had a killer time.

First up was
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It never ceases to amaze me how nice people in bands can be. The Cops, though, have topped the list. For the first time in our lives, Alec-Rene and I were guest-listed. Yeah, thats right, they put us on the guest list ’cause we were coming to interview them. Pretty sweet, eh? Thanks guys! Anyways, we had a very cheery/zany interview. It took a while to get fully grouped and seated, so by the time we started actually interviewing, we felt at ease in our conversation. Here goes:

Alec-Rene: Get Good or Stay Bad comes out in October. Tell us about it.

Mike: Thats the plan, yeah…
Dave: How do you know the title of our record?!
John: From our website…
*Justine-Marie cracks up
Dave: Shows you what we know..
*Everyone cracks up
Mike: I thought you liked the new website…
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Prom last night managed to suck pretty much (Alec-Rene and I should have gone to anti-prom at The Vera). We officially suggest going to a show instead of prom, because in our experience, it’s way funner. Somehow through all the mayhem of our prom extravaganza, we luckily made it over to EasyStreet records to catch a couple songs from …And You will Know us by the Trail of the Dead, the band with the longest name in the whole wide world. We had a nice time in our prom regalia in the front row (Met a cool guy named Hanad, volunteers at the Vera alot, you’ve prolly seen him around). There’s not much to say about the performance, it was only an instore, and we didn’t catch the whole thing (dinner reservations, you know). We did manage to snap some pics though, and a picture is, afterall, worth...

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The Saturday of this event was also prom night for some high schools, and I did see a few dresses hanging in the cars of people who were later waiting in line, but that line was longer than I expected it to be on a prom night. Accordingly, it was Anti-Prom night at the Vera Project. Nonetheless El Corazon was packed. I’m not sure if it was sold out but it was at least close. Although three of the four bands were touring in support of recently released albums and the other in support of a soon-to-be-released album, the amount of new music ricocheting and drifting around the room as well as the early hour of the show did little to keep the audience from enjoying the bands. There were some songs played that were a few years old, but they were in the minority, making up only around 25% of the whole show.

Days Away, a band I consider pretty soft,...

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Hey everyone, this isn’t going to be long or wordy or contain a lot of verbatim, there’s just a few new things that I’ve added to the site:

The Photo Gallery. It’s not anything spectacular, but I’ve been coding something that will be pretty cool if and when I finish it. For now, that is our photo gallery. It’s pretty cool. I would like to give a shoutout to Morgan Keuler as well, who has helped us out by sending us original images to display from concerts we’ve been to numerous times. He is an amazing photographer and all of us at Mercurial Sound are very appreciative of what he has done for us.

Next there is the forums. I installed them and themed them the other day (with the help of my friend Marion Rose). They are awesome. It’s part of trying to make Mercurial Sound a bit more like an online community. A blog is about rotating content, and it’s also about community. While we don’t have comments on articles (someday...

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After I picked my brother up from school Friday afternoon, we headed to The Showbox to wait for a few hours for the doors to open to a Mindless Self Indulgence show that I was too excited about to be good for me. That seemed to be the general mood of the others in line as we watched the band members exit the building and duck into their tour bus. After the show, however, vocalist Jimmy Urine was more than happy to sign or kiss anything or anyone.

First up though was Schoolyard Heroes who’d I’d been looking forward to seeing for quite some time. Vocalist Ryann Donnelly had a most captivating stage presence while Jonah Bergman drew some attention with his bass playing and yelling vocals. Steve Bonnell on guitar made some unusual sounds as well, with his instrument though. The drumming was exciting to watch to as Brian Turner changed tempos more than a teenager...

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The sound of 5,000 people singing along to to “New Slang” is something I will never forget. Last night was the Shins’ largest performance ever, with 5,000 people crammed in to the sold out show last night. It was awesome.

I’m going to start off with the downsides, so I can take off in complete adoration for both the Shins and their opening act, The Brunettes. This show was very poorly planned. We walked in to find outselves banned from the floor, because it was full. Now, my parents have trained me to know that if you can’t get on the floor, its not worth it to go. We don’t go to rock shows to sit still. Alec-Rene is one of those listener-observers, who sits in the back to absorb the scene (sits on the wall at El Corazon), but I (and Elena-Marie) am not. Now, I wouldn’t have been so frustrated were it not that...

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