Last night the hubby and I headed out to the Santa Monica Civic Center to see Rilo Kiley. I’ve seen them a handful of times now and each time I come away awed by their performance. Last night was no exception. The had a great mix of old stuff and new stuff and the crowd was involved straight through. I’ve wanted to include the youtube of their “I Love LA” encore below so you can get a feel for the show, but it kept messing up my formating – sorry. I wish I could say that The Bird & The Bee and San Diego’s Grand Ole Party were as impressive.

To be fair, I wasn’t a The Bird & The Bee fan prior to the show – regardless of how often they may pop up in the hubby’s iPod mix. Many of you may know of The Bird & The Bee from their contribution, “Again & Again” to the Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack or their ’06 dance hit (and crowd favorite) “Fucking Boyfriend.” Again, can’t say that I’m a fan, though I do appreciate their stage presence and costumes – who knew that singer, Inara George was such a style maven (then again, I totally didn’t get last night’s ensemble).

I was actually kind of digging Grand Ole Party a bit (they sound great on their MySpace) they were playing with everything they had in them. Usually, this is a good thing, but at this venue (only half-filled during their opening performance) such a loud volume just bounced around the venue and sounded quite hollow and empty and loud – very, very loud. I’m sure at a smaller venue they’d sound much better. The drummer/ singer reminds me a lot of Exene Cervenka and I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not.

The coolest thing about attending a Rilo Kiley show, outside of their performance, is the people watching. Typically, when you go to a concert, you see many young girls and women tramped out to the best of their abilities – the tighter, lower and shorter the better, you’d think. At a RiloKiley show, it’s not about getting trampy and showing as much skin as you can (though the girls do manage to show skin often enough), instead it’s about showing your unique and individual Style. You know, like everyone else. So yes, that means lots and lots of knitted wear, combat boots, black clothes, and that oh.so.fab. Olsen Twin’s look. Definitely interesting fashion choices to say the least.

Of course, this is all just a reminder of how tragically unhip I am. In the past, we’ve always been part of the older crowd at a Rilo Kiley show. Then again, they’re typically all ages shows out in Pomona (yes, I said out in Pomona!) I’m guessing that since last night was their last show here in the US, as well as a hometown, Santa Monica show, there were quite a few older adults around – and that wasn’t counting the “official” Warner Brother’s label crowd.

And just to cement how unhip and uncool I can be…we decided that since we were on West Pico that we should stop in at Don Antonio’s for dinner. Not that this alone made us uncool. No, it was the fact that we chose to check it out (instead of stopping one of our other west-side Mexican favorites) purely based on the fact that Spencer the dork, took Heidi the idiot there for not only their first date, but their “anniversary” dinner. Spencer referred to it as “life altering” so we thought we’d give it a go. It was good, but not exactly “life altering” and no, Speidi were not in attendance.