The Faint w/ The Hussy & Digital Leatherat The Bottleneck

Tickets on sale Friday 2/28/14 at 10am! http://thefaint.com/ Omaha, Nebraska, 2001. For a select assemblage of musicians and their fans, there was no better time and place. More specifically, it’s the city and year that gave us Danse Macabre. Due to a number of factors, most notably the Internet’s ability to build a global community at the click of a button, it’s unlikely that we will ever again experience a next-big-thing local music scene the way we saw places like Athens and Minneapolis blow up in the ’80s and Seattle explode in the ’90s. And when we look back at the time when music was still consumed in physical forms, Omaha will probably be remembered as the last city where a homegrown scene was developed organically with the assistance of local garages, basements, studios, clubs, and labels. The Omaha scene that we’ve come to know and love reaches as far back as the early ’90s, but it wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that the rest of the world got hip to what was going on in the middle of America. Around this time—actually, almost exactly 10 years to the day that this is being written—I headed to eastern Nebraska with the magazine that I once edited, DIW, and we did our best to chronicle what we considered to be the most exciting and vibrant hotspot in the country. Sure, part of the appeal was that a city known mostly for a bajillionaire, the College World Series, and mail-order steak was suddenly dumping a huge pile of awesomeness into our record collections, but just as impressive was the fact that unlike most regional scenes, none of these bands sounded like the other. It was also difficult not to appreciate that despite the glaring spotlight on the town at the time, the family that made up Saddle Creek Records—in some cases actual siblings, but mostly just childhood friends—seemed to be taking everything in stride. No enlarging egos, no jealous backstabbing, just a group of hardworking Midwesterners happy to be sharing their music and stories with a world that had finally started to listen. Though Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst had already achieved some commercial success, by the summer of 2002 the top dog in town was The Faint, thanks to the record that you now hold in your hands.