The Pillows played the El Rey Theater on Thursday night along with The Noodles, and it was a fantastic show. I never thought I’d get a chance to see them in concert and as it was I only found out on Tuesday about the show, so it was certainly a surprise event.
For those who don’t know, The Pillows are a rock band known in the anime community for the FLCL soundtrack. Their songs are upbeat, punk, funky and driving.
The show was awesome. The Pillows have all the energy you’d imagine from their songs, plus 10x more. Their frontman, Sawao, reminds me of frontmen like Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler; he got into the energy of the audience and acted like a swaggering, cool madman up on stage. I even thought he was going to stage-dive at some point, but no such luck. Yoshiaki Manabe, their guitarist, pulled off some very impressive melodies and is obviously a really talented musician. They played a bunch of hits from the FLCL soundtrack, along with a selection from other work. Ride On Shooting Star, Crazy Sunshine, Blues Driving Monster, Hybrid Rainbow, I Think I Can. The only song I wanted they didn’t do was Funny Bunny. Sawao took breaks to joke with the audience in broken English, recalling the time he got lost wandering the streets of LA on their last tour and even an anecdote about a new song he said was written about LA. (I unfortunately didn’t catch the title.)
All in all it was a fantastic concert and I feel really lucky to have seen them. I highly recommend checking out one of their shows if you can. Tour dates are available on their MySpace page, and the tickets for this show were $20 so you should be able to see them on the cheap.
SPIDA!
