Last night Gina and I were completely out-of-sorts, which lead to not one of our more productive rehearsals ever, except for it seems like whenever we have one of those “Real End” is impossibly great. Probably because it’s our oldest tune.

(Actually, en route an LP meeting last week I discovered that Gina has a Blogathon 2001 best-of disc in her car, which is the only existing high fidelity copy of all of those songs, including the first ever demo of Real End. Which is kinda awesome. Like, it doesn’t sound like us – it’s got a borderline indie-rock awfulness to it but it still totally holds together. I think if we still sounded like that people would like us better.)

In any event, the point of this post is that after our incredibly unfocused rehearsal we walked a few blocks over to The Dive to open for our new band-friend Kursten Bouton.

It was an interesting excursion. The Dive is, in fact, a dive. It’s essentially a South Philly row home that happens to be a bar.

We were in the upstairs, a tiny triangle of a room fronted with an abbreviated bar and terminating in a stack of huge speakers and a strange, little, wooden sidecar of a room containing an awesome, old, 16-channel board with wooden trim that I had way too much fun with. The mics and stands were a little suspect, though, and if we ever head back there I’ll probably bring my own.

Despite a relative lack of audience we had a good time hanging out with Kursten again and hearing even more of her repertoire (though my favorite pair is still “Don’t Surrender” and “Polaroid Migration”). After a few songs of intro I talked Kursten into doing an Ani song with me, and in a pinch we belted out “Gravel.” Afterwards AC played a solid 45 minute set, ending with a comfortably loungy rendition of “Noncommittal.”

Pretty fun, but mostly because of Kursten. The Dive is a cool bar to have in the neighborhood, but I’m not sure if I’d head out there just for the open mic when I could hit South Street instead.