Oxjam, by Oxfam!

Thursday at 7 30 there was a rockin’ concert at the Troubador. The Troubador is a pretty nice bar in London, where Jimi Hendrix and some other famous people performed. It looked fittingly grotty for the off-beat, indy mood of the concert. The musicians were also perfect, being so late as to hold up the show for an hour. That’s impressively stereotypical musician behavior, I’d say! I felt as if I were a cool Indy character in a movie about cool Indy people going to a cool Indy show in a cool Indy part of town.

Well, Oxfam is a really big charity organization over here which works to end poverty and injustice. They work on long-term programs to end poverty, provide assistance after natural disasters and conflicts, raise public awareness of poverty, and that sort of thing. The six pounds we paid for tickets went straight to Oxfam. If we would have bought merchandise that money would have also gone to Oxfam. As one funny member of Animal Kingdom said, “if you buy the singles, the money goes to charity. It always seems to go to charity.” Ah, the life of the starving musician.

The first performer was Catherine Tram. Catherine Tram consisted of three people, only one of which was named Catherine. In fact, two were males. It was nice, calm music, but nothing to make the listener say “wow”. There were wonderful vocals, though the males generally only sang “ahhh.” If you like Rilo Kiley you might like Catherine Tram, though her lyrics are a bit more angsty. I wrote while listening “this would be good music to have in the background while writing poetry or reading Perks of Being a Wallflower.” In other words, it was lovely, but wasn’t really my cup of tea.

The second performer was Tom Milson. He was alone, and played the electric Ukulele, sometimes supplemented by the dulcet tones of his kazoo. I will have to misquote a nice poem to say that malt does more than Milson can to justify God’s ways to man. Milson didn’t have the deepest lyrics--his first song focused on the plight of lobsters. It was lovely, however, to hear a young adult who was not dramatic. He had good songs for teens today. One of his songs, for example, is titled Internet Love Song and has the following lyrics:

Please, please please don't go
Circumflex underscore circumflex
I love you so.[...]

brb, omg, lawl.
roflmao.

Ha-ha! It’s pretty funny, I’d say. Quite witty, anyways. It was also the best kazoo act I’ve seen all year. The third act, Animal Kingdom, was also very good. Sadly, though, they were doing acoustic for the first time in a while( they just got back from touring with Snow Patrol) and so did slow, depressing songs. This happens, I guess.

Tomorrow I’m leaving for the road-trip around Europe. Cool! I should be visiting internet cafes every other day or so, and so will hopefully be able to tell of amazing adventures in foreign lands.