How is it that I’ve been in Los Angeles for more than a year and have never been to the Vista Theater, I must have passed it a thousand times? The Vista in Los Feliz is a lovely place that normally shows some pretty good movies bordering on indie and/or typically the most watchable thing that you’d find in the Arclight down the street. The exterior resembles a Spanish mission with the interior more along the lines of Cleopatra’s bedroom. (inside joke: Joan in the north and Cleo in the south.)

So to fill this movie theater with concert-going patrons, a few of the rows of seats were removed and replaced with folding chairs. I guess that spaceland promotions figured that 2 rows of folding chairs could fit into 1 row of theater seats. This would have been all well and good if it didn’t mean that a certain percentage of said concert-going patrons wouldn’t be stuck in the seats right behind renegade rows of the aforementioned folding chairs. Needless to say, some of us instantly became very close friends with the strangers sitting next to us. (My neighbor was Anthony) The folding chairs were also at least an inch and a half taller, drag for me.

Obstructions and obstacles aside, The show was quite pleasant, very cute, but musically a bit under par. The venue’s sound seemed poorly mixed and hard to control. Neither those in charge of lighting nor live sound had much to work with as all of the sound came from a pair of speaker stacks on each side of the stage at the front of the house. The makeshift stage didn’t so much elevate the band as turn them into pinball machine bumpers for the PA and stage sound.

The openers Lavender Diamond bantered nicely with the crowd and were a complementary warm-up for She & Him; but the songs were far too simple to warrant the 6+ minutes that they seemed to drag on. Zooey joined the band for a song, but like I said lasted waaay too long.

To get it out of the way Zooey Deschanel is adorable. Quite literally one of the most beautiful people to walk the earth. M. Ward is nearly equally fantastic. But the show was very ok to pretty good in the grand scheme of things. It had some nicer moments, like the vocal breakdown in “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” and of course their beautiful cover of Smokey’s “You Really Gotta Hold On Me” but really, how could you fuck that up? Still the show fell very short in comparison to either the previous time i’d seen M.Ward perform or the maybe 2 dozen female fronted bands/singer-songwriters I saw last year working in the same style. The band seemed very loose. But to their defense the problem was probably that they couldn’t hear each other because of the room’s acoustics; which seemed to pit the bass and drums against each other in Mortal Kombat. Rough spots showed through especially in an uncomfortably hurried version of “I Was Made For You” which left Zooey stumbling on what should have been a very strong melody.

To toot my Nebraska horn I recognized the bassist as Stefanie Drootin from Tim Kasher’s Cursive side-project The Good Life. To my own credit, i knew who the bassist would be before she even took the stage when I saw Ward sound-checking her instrument. I’m that good.

Ultimately I feel a show like She & Him would have translated much better at a smaller venue such as Spaceland. That also would have spared me the pain of dishing out 8 bucks for a tiny whiskey drink. I know it’s L.A. but give me a break! I honestly didn’t think that the act as a whole had the confidence to pull of a show of that size, perhaps after a run of smaller shows they will be a much better live act. Not many bands in L.A. have paid their dues and on occasions like this, it shows. I don’t recommend paying $25 to see anything at the Vista, either.