So, earlier this week I won tickets from awesome local indpendent radio station WNRN for a show in the city at Strange Matter (a restaurant/”underground music venue”); featuring up-and-comer Lindsey Jordan, aka Snail Mail, along with openers Bonny Doon (with Lyndsey sitting in on bass) and local act Sammi Lanzetta.

I’d become a fan of Snail Mail a few months back when my friend Dave (bass player for such wonderful acts as Hawthorn and Holly and Ashleytrix & the Wzrds) turned me on to the band; he’s always finding neat stuff. It’s very indie guitar pop from a 19 year old wunderkind who’s getting all sorts of buzz with her new album, Lush, so I was interested.

I’d never been to the venue before, though it’s your pretty typical RVA hipster bar: open space, flat black paint, neat old bar, stacks of vintage arcade machines in the back; typical rock club (though the restaurant menu for when there isn’t music going looks pretty great and worth trying), not all that different from the places I used to go see bands play in the mid-90s. Walking in, it was pretty clear we were some of the oldest folks there, except for the couple that walked over to chat with us and working to determine who was actually the oldest person in the bar (turns out they had a few years on us), and after a few minutes, we discovered we both got in via WNRN membership, which was cool.

Also, apparently, high-waisted mom jeans are back as a fashion thing that’s come back around for the college and twentysomething crowd.

The show itself was kind of up-and-down, Sammi Lanzetta and her band were high-energy and engaging (even if their sound was horked up – not uncommon for an opener); kind of an upbeat version of Hole/Liz Phair filtered through the Go-Gos. Really dug it. Bonny Doon was pure hipstery indie rock with a bit of a country edge; right in my wheelhouse, though a bit less frentic. Definitely going to dig through their recorded output.

Snail Mail was…okay. She and her band sounded great (she’s got some serious chops), though as a performer, I’m not sure she’s quite done cooking yet, if you know what I mean. I understand that it’s the typical thing for young indie rockers to do the shoegaze thing these days and not interact much with the crowd, but I kind of felt the energy was off – I’m used to lots of give-and-take with the audience – as a performer, I know I draw energy from the crowd, and they draw it from us on stage; that wasn’t happening with the headliners last night. The youngsters in the crowd were, however, into it, though the band kind of looked a bit bored. I think some of it has to do with Lindsey’s inexperience and relative age, though seeing her sit in on bass with the previous act, she was bouncy, engaging and having a blast – but I didn’t get the sense of fun when she was out front. Oh well; I expect in ten years she’ll be amazing once she gets a few hundred more shows under her belt and a bit more life experience.

Or, you know, I was just and old man up past my bedtime watching music being performed for and by folks my eldest daughter’s age ( and who was also kind of distractingly shorter than my ten-year-old), and just didn’t get it.

Who knows…I can still rock, right?