Friday night D.C. welcomed a fresh face, an old friend, and a foreign band with a peculiar fascination with hands, eyes, and lights. We walked in to American University’s Bender Arena catching only the tail end of the Silversun Pickups’ set to find the bleacher seats completely filled. It was as if the concert goers were forced to attend some lecture rather than voluntarily choosing to buy tickets to a show. Maybe they were just…

It’s not often that a venue can be the undoing of an artist’s performance, but that was the very case for emo-rockers Jimmy Eat World’s otherwise energetic show at American University’s Bender Arena. While the Arizona-based band tightly maneuveured their way through songs spanning a long career, one could hardly help but feel the dissonance between performance and place. It may have been the basketball arena’s bleachers, it may have been the banners touting the…