Saw him last night. Third or fourth time I have seen him live. Great show, although in a bigger venue a lot of the intimacy which made the first few times I saw him so special was lost.
He races through the first fifth of the show. The title track reaches a nice crescendo but True Affection loses a fair bit live which is a shame. I love that song but it seems more of a studio cut. Smiling and Astride Me still rules, god I love the guitar in that. He finally broke the fourth wall around the time of Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt... which is good. There are quite a few songs from the new album that are a slog on record but come across better live because you realise how funny the lyrics are, and that song is a prime example. Bored in the USA is another, I can't get through that song on record but it was a highlight live, just for how meta the whole thing was. He did some great banter beforehand ("how many of you, and be honest, just jumped on the bandwagon now that I've been nominated for a best packaging grammy?") and the performance of the song was collaborative with the crowd - as it gets to that part with the canned laughter the crowd catches on, cheers and claps between lines, laughs and FJM is having a great time prompting the audience, it was awesome. Still don't like the song much but the perfromance was a lot of fun. That and the next half hour or so was the best part. Plenty of fantastic banter (a full-on Q&A with the audience, musings on packaging, Melbourne and so on) and then he played pretty much all my favourites (This is Sally Hatchet, Hollywood Forever, god those drums rule). I was never big on Fun Times in Babylon but it was really nice tonight, the "look out Hollywood here I come" line and the melancholic slide guitar/synth was a really nice touch, and then the main set closer was Holy Shit (with a freakout ending) leading into Ideal Husband, which is the song I was most looking forward to hearing, and fuck did it deliver. It was an absolutely immense eight or nine minutes. So fucking loud and rocking, I loved it so so so much. More banter after the encore break, then closed with I Went to the Store, which is pretty lovely and finally Every Man Needs a Companion.
So overall the spectacle was not as good/fun because of the bigger venue and crowd (and OF COURSE I had to be stationed next to the six biggest shitheads in the room who apparently did not realise they were not at a festival and drunkenly talking dancing and smashing tin cans on the ground all the way through) and so the banter suffered a bit too as it wasn't as close (and also last time I saw him he was a combination of jetlagged, drunk and high, had a third eye stuck on, was in a ridiculous clothing and there was a bandmember he had a lot of sexual innuendo with and I'm not sure if he's still part of the band or what) BUT ALL THAT SAID it was still a great show and worth the price of admission alone for The Ideal Husband.