The Grates played a secret show incognito (albeit in name only, no disguises :( ) last night at the Troubadour in Brisbane to test their new material / burn off some excess energy before the secret shows and music festivals in a few weeks time. They played six songs from the new album. Besides Burn Bridges I really loved Earthquake, Biggest Largest Adventure Ever and Aw Yeah . Look out for these cracking new tunes among others at Splendour, on the album, at the secret shows etc., they’ll be big I tell ya, BIG. All the new stuff sounds heaps epic. Not as poppy, as brilliantly poppy as their last album was, but now the new stuff just sounds larger. I don’t know how else to describe it but is is a cool thing.

Disappointments of the night: My shouted response from the middle of the room of “Two Thousand and Grate” to Patience saying it was “the best Tuesday night of 2008” didn’t get much more than a nod of the head from the girl next to me. That was my best material. Also, Patience didn’t marry me and I didn’t see a girl I was hoping to see there but that’s not really The Grates’ fault I guess.

The best bits: they still totally bounce around the stage like little carebears shot up with taurine, are as cutely rainbow mouthed as ever on stage but off stage are the most laid back nice people with the show ending with Patience giving the crowd hugs after crowd surfing to the back of the venue then all band members hanging around for an hour or more chatting to people and the confirmation they they are web 2.0 compliant after I told them they had the best Australian band blog before then talking tumblr, twitter, social networks with John.

All in all: 5 out of 3.

I think I miss doing tech support.

It’s been 18 months since I’ve been away from the help desk barrage but I’ve been answering easy internets/computer questions of people I don’t know via re-blogs and the other day on the radio I agreed to talk people through the best ways to deal with and eliminate email spam. Doing anything like that used to make me want to cry but now I actually half enjoy it.

I figure it only seems good because people you randomly help on the internet and radio better communicate their problem and appreciate any assistance compared to the self-entitled psycho customers who were always confused and annoyed so wanted to take it out on anyone even though the support issues invariably in 90% of cases were because of user issues (eg. they couldn’t type their email address correctly or didn’t read basic set up instructions or just had no knowledge of the service being provided). I hated them and they hated me so each phone call and email was like like a fight. Good times. Will definitely go back to it when hell freezes over, George W Bush is elected to a third term in November 2008, insert another unlikely melodramatic statement, etc.