I was expecting Peter Bjorn and John to be one of those terrific-sounding but boring-to-watch live shows. The kind where the band play their songs well, sound just like their album, and look like a still photograph onstage. I end up at a lot of shows like that, and it's a drag. And since these are usually gentle indie-rock bands who are failing to, well, rock, there's not much for an audience to do but shuffle and sway and stand there.
This is something that's been troubling me about rock shows a lot lately, this feeling that nothing's happening, that I'm witnessing a nonevent. It probably has to do with the half-remembered and self-mythologized punk shows from my teenage past, every one of which seemed vital at the time. And there's this kind of mass-culture myth that at one point in the past—the radical '60s, the punk/hardcore heyday of the late '70s/early '80s, or maybe the Seattle boom of the early '90s—rock shows were monumental events, historical moments, even.
So, yes, some of it is perhaps me being jaded or having impossibly high expectations, but a lot of it is that, really, not much happens at most shows. People stand still, bands perform standing still, there are drinks. It feels only slightly different from watching TV (you're standing up for one thing). I've come to expect so little from most shows that I'm surprised—and thrilled—when a band put even a little effort into it, or when there's some actual activity from the crowd.
With DJs or laptop jockeys, the expectations are different—crowd participation is as, or more, important than onstage antics—if the show's not worth watching, it's no big deal, you're there to dance. So it's even more unexpected when, say, Mohawked NYC producer Passions ripped off his shirt and jumped on top of his laptop table at the climax of his May 11 set at Broken Disco. And with dance bands like Soulwax, LCD Soundsystem, or !!!—who in eight days supplied Seattle with a whole summer's worth of awesomeness—there's certainly an expectation of crowd movement, and that's backed up by plenty of action onstage, too.
But with too many traditional rock shows, there's too little to watch and even less to do. So Peter Bjorn and John's early set at Neumo's on May 13 was a pleasant, if mild, surprise. I was prepared for a laid-back delivery of the twee indie pop of Writer's Block, but the band injected their songs with über-professional high-energy showmanship—jumping around the stage, inviting a fan up to play bongos, striking guitar-solo poses, bowing between songs. It was still a largely inert sold-out crowd—it was early—but these gestures at least made it feel like the band was trying to make it a happening.
That performances like the ones from Passions or Peter Bjorn and John stand out at all is sad—this sort of energy should be the baseline for concerts, not the pinnacle. 
