The Silversun Pickups Surprise At The Echo

Last night at The Echo was a rare treat... I'd known that The Silversun Pickups' lead Brian Aubert was going to perform at the last night of The Radar Bros' free residency there, but I guess I assumed he was going to play some sort of solo material that I hadn't heard before and didn't know what to expect.

What we got instead was stripped down versions of some of The Silversun Pickups' best tracks from their Pikul EP and Carnavas album. Aubert played them all solo, except for vocals by bassist Nikki Monninger (backup on one song, with lead on their cover of The Movies' Creation Lake) and some help by Radar Bros' Jim Putnam. It was one of the loudest, most spirited acoustic performances I've seen since Bob Mould played solo at The Roxy last fall -- when he, incidentally, commented about how much he liked SSPU.

The show took me back a few years to when The Silversun Pickups were, like The Airborne Toxic Event are doing right now, playing a month of Thursdays at Spaceland. I went to all five nights and hopped around like an idiot madman at every one ... and had some of the best times I've ever had seeing live music.

They were so much fun that you got the sense that being able to catch them in a small venue was a limited time proposition and that you'd need to make your piece with the fact that seeing them there may be the last time before they were playing big, impersonal spots like The Wiltern or beyond.

And I did, and that was true, but somehow we got this nice little welcome surprise last night. Couldn't help grinning from ear to ear through the lion's share of the set.