You're not gonna like this one, Mom...

So, Wednesday night, Amanda and I hopped a train at 5:50 pm to Luxembourg city with the express intent of seeing one of our favorite bands, The Faint, perform. We arrived in the city around 6:45 with an hour and room to spare to find the venue (which was supposedly a mere 200 meters from the train station) and also find something for Amanda to eat.

As we had been informed, the venue, den Atelier, was only a ten minute walk from the train station, which meant that we would, as expected, probably have to leave the concert with a half hour remaining in order to catch the last train from Luxembourg back to Trier for the night. We wandered around, found a delicious hamburger, and made it back to den Atelier, an old auto warehouse that had been converted into a venue in 1995 and has since hosted some huge name bands, including the Smashing Pumpkins (twice), with time to spare.

My goodness, was it good to see hipsters again, to see those music snobs who really DO exist everywhere! Luxembourg is actually a pretty cool city... I like that it's bigger than Trier and seems to have multiple genres of people, unlike the fairly static groups one sees in Trier. On the way to the venue, I got sparkled at, and Amanda and I were oohlala'd from a car. (Yeah, maybe a little creepy, but more hilarious and awesome that we were oohlala'd in a French-speaking country!) To pass the time before the opening band, we played Hipster Bingo, picking out such trademark hipster features from among the audience, such as trucker hat, 4 foot girl, Asian hipster, boy wearing girl jeans, and ironic mustache.

The warm-up act was talented, but laughable, mixing a bass, guitar, keytar, and drum machine well, but in a boring manner, and pairing it with lyrics straight out of an 8th grade poetry class. (Who whispers "my father's eyes" eight times during a bridge? Ugh.) But, they were amusing enough... and then The Faint came on.

Holy goodness, was I blown away! I had been expecting a great show, having heard the huge synth noises emanating from the venue during the sound check, but WOW. They are even better live than recorded, and their sound guy is incredible! (His name is Dutch... really, it is!... which apparently goes over quite well in Holland: "Hi, I'm Dutch." "Really. You don't sound Dutch.") They played almost all of their songs that I was hoping to hear including some good stuff off of their newest release, and also had a great show visually. The lead dude, Todd, wore a lab coat and goggles and ran around being awesome.

During the show, we met a chick who sort of "owns" her own media company. Basically, this means she runs around following bands throughout their tours, being a good girl groupie, and trying to get interviews with them. She does things like follow MCR their entire tour (not fucking sure why) and trying to get an interview but getting rejected by their media people, then holding up a poster at their last show and having Gerard grant her an interview.

Aaaanyway... yeah, her first words to me, after "Where are you from?" were, "Are you following The Faint?" Well, no... we're not exactly fangirls. But, I did start a conversation with her, and, after hearing we were from America, offered to see after the show if the dudes in The Faint would want to talk with us a little. This worked out well for us, as Amanda and I had already pretty much decided to say screw the train and stay for the entire show, which meant we'd get the privilege (?) of hanging around Luxembourg until 5:17 the next morning.

Thus, after hanging around the venue for a while after the show, I popped my head in the tour bus door asking if Brigitte was inside. Magically, a bunch of people started coming out of the bus, and Amanda and I ended up spending about four hours on the streets of Luxembourg, standing outside the tour bus, talking with various members of The Faint entourage. They were very nice, particularly the keyboardist, Jacob; the sound dude, Dutch; and the guitarist, Dapose. Their merch girl/tour manager/whoever exactly she is was also super... when she found out we didn't actually live in Lux, but had to wait around, these were her words: "Oh, you don't live here? You want some booze or something?" Ha.

And that is how Amanda and I ended up with a traveler of lime vodka and a huge bottle of Jim Beam, gifts from The Faint. (No, Mom, we did not drink it all. Enough to keep us warm... but we still have half the bottle of whiskey left over, and Jacob was the one who drank most of the other half!)

A good evening was had by all. We caught another train at 5:17 am, made it back into freezing cold Trier at 6:07, bussed back to the Uni, ate tortellini, and slept. We saw a great show, got oohlala'd and sparkled at, and hung out and talked about America and Europe with some great guys from Omaha, Nebraska.


Note to those in the Cities: The Faint are playing at First Ave in November. I highly recommend going... it's a great show!


NOTE: Thanks to Brigitte of TasteItTV for the great photos! Left is lead singer, Todd, right is Jacob, keyboardist.