Concert Review: Third Eye Blind

"This band was hi-jacked by the radio a few years ago. But this is where we're supposed to be. Playing clubs. And we're going to play for a long time," Stephen Jenkins, Third Eye Blind's lead singer, said about halfway through the show to a crowd of about 2,000.

Both of those statements turned out to be true.

After playing two encores and a set of an hour and 55 minutes, I can safely say out of the 100 or so shows I've seen, this was one of the five best. Everything I hate about concerts didn't happen at this one. There were no packs of screaming girls desperate to sleep with Jenkins (plus he's dating Vanessa Carlton) only fans that new every lyric to every deep cut on the band's albums. There was no All-American Rejects style 45 minute sets, they played for about two hours. There was no pretentious "we're not going to play our hits," they played every charting single other than "Losing a Whole Year," and also played rare B-sides and the unedited version of Slow Motion.

The band sounded spot on. For deciding to play three random shows in the Midwest (Chicago, Notre Dame, and Milwaukee) the band sounded tight, and Jenkin's voice seems to have improved greatly since the bands inception.

About six years ago, the only way to see this band was in an ampitheater of with 15,000 other people, now you can see them with 2,000 true fans. And the thing is, the band is better than they were in the past. They proved last night that the "radio years" were an aberration. This is no cookie cutter pop/rock band. They played a long, intense set of finely polished rock music. What else do people what from a live performance?

The Verdict: ****