Live Review: Does It Offend You, Yeah? @ DC9, September 5

For those of you that have not yet had the pleasure of attending a show at DC9, I need to impress upon you one very, very important detail about this particular venue: it is small. Very small. Not the smallest venue ever, surely, but small enough to make you feel a wee bit claustrophobic on nights when a hugely, hotly, hyperly hyped band from foreign shores lands, selling out the venue in advance and ultimately pushing the fire code numbers to the limit.

Needless to say, when I ventured up 95 for the Does It Offend You, Yeah? show, the place was quite possibly more jammed than I've ever seen it. Great for the band, great for the venue, bad for any possible notions of personal space. It was a night of ceaseless sweat, endless dancing, and unstoppable awesomeness. Those little scamps came, saw, conquered, and left us wanting more all in the span of just about an hour.

It wasn't the best show I've been to all year, but it just might be the most entertaining. The super full club was enraptured, and jumped up and down so much and with such lustful abandon that on numerous occasions I was pretty sure the floor was about to collapse, killing us all. But hey, there certainly are worse ways to go. While I lost count of the number of times I was elbowed, poked, and kicked, I was just pleased to see people enjoying themselves as much as I was. And the gleeful performance given by Does It Offend You, Yeah? was most definitely worthy of our adulation. They rolled through bits and bobs from the album You Have No Idea What You're Getting Yourself Into, such as the synthily anthemic "Dawn of the Dead" and my pair of favorites (perfectly played back-to-back), "Being Bad Feels Pretty Good" and "Let's Make Out." It was as if we were witnessing modern day Pied Pipers, because the kids couldn't stop dancing. Each song was given a welcome you'd expect from a large venue, never mind a tiny one. It was the perfect Friday night show, the best way to kick off the weekend.

When it's all said and done, their song "We Are Rockstars" might be tongue-in-cheek, but on this night, the members of Does It Offend You, Yeah? were every bit the rock star.