you may tire of me cause our december sun is setting

Death Cab For Cutie and Franz Ferdinand finished off their six week co-headlining tour at the Pacific Coliseum last night.

We arrived to only catch one song from The Cribs. When the show was first announced at the Coliseum, the upper level was scheduled to be closed off. By showtime when the two headliners took the stage, there were a fair amount of people that filled the whole upper blue sections.

Death Cab came on and opened with Passenger Seat and Different Names For The Same Thing. They followed that with great, energetic performances of The New Year and We Laugh Indoors. Their set design included trees in the middle and white houses on both sides of the stage. The houses contained some lights in them, making for some cool lighting effects throughout their performance.

Death Cab For Cutie shows are better suited to smaller venues such as the Commodore where the sound is tighter and the intimacy of their songs can be felt. For the Death Cab / Franz tour which is all ages, the demand for the shows certainly increase by quite a bit. Unfortunately, the city doesn't have a decent venue to hold a mid range capacity crowd of a few thousand (both the Plaza Of Nations and the PNE Forum have a history of producing horrible sound with a lot of echoes).

Never before had I not wanted to hear a song that I loved by a band at a show. However, as soon as the Coliseum was announced as the venue for the gig, I hoped that they wouldn't play Transatlanticism. That song means too much to me, and I knew the importance and meaning of the song would get lost in the vast space of the Coliseum and the all ages crowd.......so I'm pretty glad they didn't play it on this night.

I must say though that Death Cab still put on a good performance with the exception that since they weren't closing the show, there was no encore and their set lasted just over an hour. They did bust out some fine versions of Title and Registration, A Movie Script Ending, Crooked Teeth, What Sarah Said, President Of What, and Soul Meets Body. For We Looked Like Giants, Ben hopped on a second drumkit near the end and dueled with Jason for a bit. That was kind of neat.

Franz Ferdinand took the stage to the delight of the antzy teenagers and opened with The Boy, followed by Do You Want To. The Scottish pop-rock quartet played a fun and enjoyable set. It's interesting to witness how much their set differs from the Death Cab performance, and how there were people in the audience to see one band but not the other. For what Death Cab brings in the emotional, heartfelt, melodic department, Franz brings in the poppy and hook-laden riffs to the table.

All the guys in Franz were having fun and jumping around the stage to numbers such as Walk Away, Eleanor Put Your Boots On, and Take Me Out. Alex Kapranos did his long bit where he introduces all the band members during The Fallen.

This being the last show of the tour, Ben Gibbard came out dressed in a gorilla suit to dance around during one number. For the encore song Outsiders, all members of The Cribs and Death Cab came out and each person had a drum set in front of them. What followed next were 10 drummers going at it while Alex, Nick, and Robert played their guitars and bass up front on stage. They finished off their 1hr 10min set with This Fire.