Regular crowd pleasers mewithoutYou rolled through Rumba Cafe for a last minute show with Columbus’ The Dead is Dead on Super Bowl Sunday to a full house. GIven the way the game went, this show was the far superior alternative to indulging the yearly winter football tradition.

The Dead is Dead, comprised of several members of other Columbus projects (some defunct, some active) powered through some garage-y rock n roll tunes with interspersed bad jokes (fully embraced as such) from the frontman of the group. Drummer Michael Murtha (of early IATU favorites Strangers in Daylight) held down the rhythm section with poise and on point movements. Several songs took the “less is more” approach, ending in a sense that was not premature, yet meant to leave the listener wanting.

With little fanfare, mewithoutYou began their set abruptly, startling the crowd into bobbing their heads along to “Torches Together.” Seriously, I feel like if I were to have an overhead view of the crowd I feel like I’d find more heads bobbing in unison, not just bobbing but enthusiastically swaying, moreso than most other shows I’ve attended. The band has a way of making a mood sweep a room so that everyone is part of the show at the same time.

The set was well balanced with old and new favorites. The biggest surprise inclusion was hearing not one but two songs off of A–>B Life (“Nice and Blue” and “Bullet to Binary”). The biggest surprise song left out of the set was “In A Sweater Poorly Knit.” I thought for sure this would be in the encore but instead we heard “Bullet to Binary” followed by Ten Stories cuts “Cardiff Giant” and “All Circles,” the latter which Aaron Weiss prefaced with an intro describing the song as having one line. As always, it was great to watch the contrast between Weiss’ humble demeanor and soft spoken conversational tone with the crowd and his crazed persona when actually performing. The rest of the band, whom should not be overlooked were crazily on point as usual. I’d like to give special notice to the intricate guitar work of Michael Weiss, whose talent is probably swept under the rug frequently given his proximity stage left of his much more eccentric brother.

Needless to say, I arrived at Rumba Cafe expecting another memorable performance from mewithoutYou and they delivered, per usual. This may have been my favorite performance yet from them, even if they didn’t perform “O Porcupine,” my favorite.

Here’s a bootleg video of “Nice and Blue” from the show, that we found on YouTube.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyqjvqxlmNo&h=297&w=450]