Friday night may have been rainy in the flood-strewn streets of downtown Seattle, but that didn't stop Sunny Day Real Estate's homecoming after being on the road for a month from happening.

The group continues to enrapture fans with their complex musical arrangements and Jeremy Enigk's abstract lyrics.  The intensity that the band delivered that night was more tempered, more controlled.  It was so different from the unbridled force that they showed when I first saw them at the Kitsap County Fairgrounds for Endfest back in 1994.  Those two performances may have been slightly different in a sense that the earlier one relied on youth and enthusiasm and the latter leaned on experience and wisdom of age to power through the sets.  Both were effective approaches to anyone out there to see them from a performer's standpoint. 

The songs they played rushed back quite a bunch of memories: those afternoons after work, listening to KGRG while waiting for my bus ride, I then first heard SDRE's 47 being played almost every day.  This was the summer after Kurt Cobain shuffled off this mortal coil.  This to me also was the signal of change that once again was supposed to happen to the Seattle music scene.  This band is the link between the old grunge school and the sounds of today we all hear in Death Cab For Cutie and their contemporaries.

I can't believe that there was a 15 year gap between when I first saw them and this event.  I'm sure that quite a bunch of folks in the audience were also there with me in that rainy field that late summer day to re-experience a bit of youth even if it was just for one evening.

In Circles -Sunny Day Real Estate