First Borns and Color Animal @ the Flying M Concert-Garage (6/28/13)

A band I'd never seen before was going to play the Flying M out in Nampa.  That was all I needed to see.  I marked the show down on the calendar.

Not many others did.  There were six people at the concert-garage when I got there.  The audience never rose over fifteen.  So it goes, I guess.

Color Animal played first.  I knew that this Salt Lake City group would play the Red Room the next night.  By the end of this set, I was hoping that they'd play to a much larger crowd there.  Their boyish vocals, their sunny tunes, their bright, weaving guitars, their straight-ahead basslines and their fluid, driving drums sounded like a cross between the Strokes and the Very Most.  Wiry, dreamy, rocking.

In the modest crowd was a family whom the band apparently knew from SLC.  Didn't hear them griping about the drive out to Nampa...

First Borns played next.  This group seems to rock harder each time I see them, and this set was no exception.  Christopher Smith worked a little sneer into his vocals, Alex Hecht slashed away at his guitar strings and Erik Butterworth's drumming had a nice muscular swing to it.  They may have sounded a little ragged at times, but that just added to the punkish feel of this set.  Smith said that they might retire "Gene," the first song that they wrote together, after this set.  I like that song okay, but considering their uptick in intensity, I'm more interested in what they'll come up with next.

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