Ride on Shooting Star (Ganbatte-Fest '08, Part 3)

The pillows are a Japanese rock band whose sound is usually compared to that of the Pixies but without all the Spanglish and jokes about fucking. I was first exposed to their music, like most Americans, by watching Fooly Cooly (FLCL), which is an absurdist Bildungsroman Japanese cartoon about weapons-grade Gibson guitars being pulled out of transdimensional portals in people’s skulls and on whose soundtrack the music of the pillows is featured prominently.

I can recall being nineteen years old, a recent high school graduate, watching FLCL for the first time just a couple of weeks before I headed off to college and my first real taste of the great unknown and thinking, "man, it would be awesome to see these guys play live. " And now I am in Japan, and I actually did get to see them play live. These pictures are of the events leading up to that fateful concert.