The sweet spot for concert-going

After a steady six months of Alligator and Boxer in heavy rotation on all my musical devices, I saw The National last night at the 9:30 club in DC. It's a great venue and I was happy to put faces to some of the most evocative music of our generation. The show was also being recorded and broadcast on NPR.

I preface with these details to remark that I loved the show, but it didn't break into my all-time best concerts pantheon for reasons that I think have nothing to do with what was onstage. I think that my heavy listening may have pushed me passed the sweet spot for concertgoing to an overfamiliarity with each chord and vocal warble such that the show was being checked against the LPs constantly in my mind.

When I think back on some of the best shows that I've seen, most were bands that I had just gotten into and didn't know front to back before I saw their show. It makes me think there is a perfect time to see a band, from a familiarity standpoint. You can't have listened to the most recent album more than say, four times, but you must have latched on to at least one banger, so that you can lose your shit at the opening riff.

I think this sweet spot calculus is largely unexamined in the hyper/hater cycle of music conversations. What say you?