It's not stretching the point to say that "23" was the one track that most sounds like 2008 to me - there's no song that I listened to more, nor any which took on as much significance, over the 12 months just gone - and I can't imagine a better way for the year to have been rung out and the new one welcomed than with Blonde Redhead playing it at midnight last night (it's 1.45pm on 1 January, local time, as I write this), vivid and loud and clangorous, like the whole of the show that had come before it, with confetti from above still glittering on the crowd's heads and clothing. It was an obvious one for them to pick - from their entire, lengthy back catalogue, it's almost certain the most swooningly straight-ahead surge - but that didn't make it any less right.
This was how I chose to spend my new year's eve - alone in a crowd in NYC, at this concert - and it felt like the right thing to have done, for all of the minor inconveniences that it entailed (getting lost on the way in an unfamiliar city, navigating massive crowds and police lines, freezing half to death, trying to keep my footing on the roads made slippery by the sludgy snowfalls of earlier in the day). They were dazzling, kicking off with "Dr Strangeluv" and, after an initial run of several 23 cuts, also digging into Misery is a Butterfly and Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons which produced a couple of the show's highlights (most notably the ever epic "In Particular"). Everything was loud and wonderful. That said, it was odd - the whole of the concert was somehow less than the sum of its parts...while nearly every song was amazing, the overall experience was merely great; I couldn't put my finger on why. Still, all in all, pretty great.
