Our undercover correspondent Pia Agrawal reports back from her trip to the unannounced Cap’n Jazz reunion show last Friday at the Empty Bottle in Chicago:

Two of the most common thoughts running through any of my given days are Tim Kinsella and kitty cats so, with a last minute tip that my dreams could intersect at the corner of W. Cortez and N. Western, I shoved my possessions into a Ziploc and hopped on a plane to Chicago. Anxiety ridden with both the shame of my obsessive loser fandom and the small chance that I would actually miss the entire set, I talked to every single person that would listen about my race against the clock. With assurances from an equally Chicago-bound Hell’s Angel that everything would indeed be okay (Aok? har har), I made it with plenty of time to see the 13 minutes I had waited almost 13 years for.

Playing the hits (Little League, Oh Messy Life, We Are Scientists!, and Que Suerte!) under the guise “Local Cover Band,” Cap’n Jazz stuck to their short set without acknowledging a hiatus, without discussing the will-they or wont-they of future touring plans, without reminding me that it’s not 1995 but hey, thanks for coming out anyway. Having been to far more reunion shows than I’d like to admit (Weston. TWICE.), there’s a constant element of depression in standing there realizing that I’ll never be as excited about music as I was when I was in high school. That these musicians will never mean quite what they did when we were all 10 years younger. And while bands like Jawbreaker and The Promise Ring remain in pretty constant rotation for me even now, what makes Cap’n Jazz stand out, what made them stand out on a matchless night in Chicago, is not their ability to make me remember being 15, but their ability to make this loser fan feel truly young again.

Decent quality mp3′s of the entire four song set can be downloaded here. Or check out the energy in this video recorded from stage left by Oh My Rockness: