For being a record hot week in Kansas City, Friday night was a bearable ordeal when it came to the temperature. With regard to the music, however, the evening was a much more hospitable affair. It was an eclectic lineup for sure.

As an opener, the Crash Kings got their due with the early crowd and likely earned some fresh looks and new fans for the effort. Against Me! paced themselves through a scorcher of a set before giving way to DEVO, a stylistic transition that was less than seamless. The quintet’s 80s art school punk sound that once served as heavy rotation fodder during the heady early days of MTV was in rare form, accompanied by a stage show that was an inflatable human-sized hamster ball and a couple of confetti cannons away from finding a more contemporary analog.

The Silversun Pickups may have benefited from the cooler breezes of the evening but had to push their way through a miserably muddy and overdriven sound mix that was as thick as the pungent humidity pressing down upon the crowd. And to cap off the night, Ben Folds managed to transform the City Market into a sweaty piano bar complete with a raucously engaged crowd ready to belt along with every tune. Be sure to check out the excellent review on Back To Rockville. My pics from the evening are below…

[Full disclosure: Many thanks to Mary at Sideways Media, the promo folks for Crash Kings, for passing along tickets for Friday's show.]