Back to the Future.

So you can read a preview of yesterday's Ponys show I wrote here. If you really read that last sentence you'll see it's a bit wonky time-wise. Anyway, some personal fun facts about the band not included in the article:

• Jared, the singer, used to drum for a punk band that played on bills with my old band. Once his whole band got mad at me over a poster my band made for a show and the whole band terrorized me for a few weeks and kept threatening to pin me down and cut off all my hair. This scared the shit out of me. To be honest Jared didn't really have anything to do with this, it was more the domain of his psychotic (like scarily so) bassist. Instead jared distinguished himself by being the likeable statesman of his peer group who just happened to be a monster behind the drum kit.
  
• Melissa, the bassist, was my old roomate and I've known her since our Freshman year of college (which is further in the past than anyone would immediately think by just looking at either of us.) I have no wild and crazy storis about her because she was never particularly wild and crazy. Instead she stood out from the crowd by mainly being kind. This was a rather unusual trait amongst the motley crew I used to run with.
  
• Nathan, the drummer, actually knows Photogal from her early years at college. I actually remember being at a party where he told me he was in a band but it took me another year to connect one and one and figure out that he was in fact playing with old friends from way back. I don't know him really well aside from a few drinking sessions at a few parties over the years but he is, like Melissa (and come to think of it,actually, Jared), one of the nicest people I've ever met

So I read back over yesterday's review and hope my affection for the band came through. I purposely haven't written about them over the last couple years because a) they certainly didn't need it and b) I was afraid that I might be terribly biased and turn in a piece of fawning crap rather than a fair-minded survey of the group's actual talents.¹

Well, which side of the fence does the piece fall on? You tell me.

¹This is also the reason I rarely write about Rachael Yamagata.