I’d like to say that I was surprised how good Ok Go were at Monolith, but I’d be lying. The truth is, I feel like I was waiting for this day to come. You see, in a weird way, Ok Go were the first step in my career toward music blogging. In high school I grabbed a promo CD for their debut album while on a trip to Washington DC. It had their first single “Get Over It” (which is still awesome) on it and I fell in love. Up until around this time I’d really only listened to oldies, so this was the first time when I got to share a good, new song with my friends. Years later, I started a blog where that’s pretty much all I do. And now Ok Go have come back into the picture in a fantastic way this past Saturday at Monolith.

The first thing I have to say is that you should not expect this from every major label band who had a handful of singles you recognize. Most of those groups, in my experience, are nice enough to spend a few minutes with at a festival, but overall quite boring live. Ok Go is not that type of band. Even the songs I had never heard before were great and enthusiastically performed. I’m not sure if this is true or not, but I got the feeling that Ok Go must tour quite a lot or spend a lot of time practicing.

But before I go talking too much about how they impressed me with the songs I hadn’t heard, let me first stress that hearing their hit songs was just fantastic. The stop and go crunch of the guitars in “Get Over It” sound 100x better live than they do on record and the joy on their faces as they launch into the chorus of “Here It Goes Again” is worth almost as much as the first time you saw its music video.

And the dudes in Ok Go seem like completely rad fellows. If their goofball videos and dork-pop songs weren’t enough to go by, their show painted profiles along the same lines. Lead singer Damian Kulash came and played out in the crowd (here he is going back to the stage) and then later moved his guitar and microphone out beyond the stage so that he could be in the rain and share some solidarity with the thousands of soaked fans. He sang a tender acoustic song, which he prefaced by saying that it was the only three minutes during which he would not be a “sarcastic asshole.”

So if it’s possible to call yourself a fan of a band while only knowing four of their songs, then I’m a fan of Ok Go. If not, well then I’m just a guy who enjoyed a show they did one time in Denver, Colorado. But I think I like the sound of “fan” a bit better.

More photos after the break.