Shall we gather at The Tabernacle

Saturday, November 22, 2008 Our road trip to Atlanta this past weekend was way too brief, but it was enjoyable. After checking into the Embassy Suites downtown and partaking in the manager's free cocktail reception in the lobby (woo-hoo!), we hooked up with Ashlee's long-time friend, Terry, for dinner at Spoon, a small Thai restaurant just off the GA Tech campus. Excellent food and fun. We couldn't talk Terry into going to the concert with us just down the street at The Tabernacle and that's too bad because he missed a pretty good show. There were four bands playing with one of our favs, Augustana, slated third to play and the show started at 7 PM - we arrived at around 8:30 - plenty of time to see Augustana's full set, right? Uhh, wrong??? They were more than halfway thru their set when we arrived and it was only an hour and a half into the show?? Granted, the two bands before them we had never heard of but what did they play? Two songs each?? It was a bit of a disappointment that the one time we plan to be "fashionably late" to a concert it bites us in the butt. On the bright side, we were able to see a half-dozen or so songs performed by Augustana including a nice acoustic version of "Sweet and Low" and a rousing cover of The Traveling Wilburys' "Handle Me With Care." It takes guts and talent to pull that one off and they did it flawlessly. They closed their set with another strong cover of the Delta blues-rock classic, "Baby, Please Don't Go." As we waited on OneRepublic to take the stage to close the show, we wondered around The Tabernacle and were very impressed with this venue. It's a beautiful old historic building with tons of general admission seating on the second and third floors plus the open first floor in front of the stage. Acoustics and sight-lines were good and the location in downtown Atlanta next to the Olympic Park was safe and convenient. We will definitely add this gem to our collection of places we would come to again. Back to the music. OneRepubic is a fairly new band birthed literally from the internet and MySpace. They have two songs that we had heard, so we weren't super-familiar with them. Reviews of their live performance were positive, so we were hoping for the best and actually got a pretty good show. The really surprising thing was that the 5-piece band is actually much more musically-talented than their poppy radio-friendly hits - "Apologize" and "Stop and Stare" - truly indicate. Lead singer, Ryan Tedder, has a strong voice with decent range along with great piano self-accompaniment. The most interesting aspect of the band was their use of instruments like the cello, the xylophone and the Spanish guitar that are not usually associated with a "rock band." While The Tabernacle is a fairly small venue, these guys might actually be more appreciated in an ever smaller more intimate venue (perhaps unplugged) to truly experience these instruments being used in their songs and not somewhat drowned out by rock-concert standard maxed-out vocals, guitar and drums. Overall, they put on a solid performance with good energy and flow that was worth checking out.