Don’t get me wrong. I like music loud. Really. When we saw Billy Joel last week, I spent the first half of the concert thinking, “When are they going to turn the sound up?”

But tonight’s concert at The Black Cat was just miserable. We parked ourselves in the back of the theater away from the crowds, sharing a table with a nice young couple who offered us the spare seats at their table. But when they left, they were replaced by a cigar-smoking couple, which left me feeling unhappy and nauseated.

And the sound. Why was it so loud that I felt like I would have enjoyed the concert more from the 14th Street sidewalk? I like to feel the bass vibrate around inside me as much as anybody. But there’s no cause for it to be so loud that the band members can’t hear themselves perform and when the venue compensates for the lack of surround sound by turning the volume up as loud as it would go.

I admit that I wasn’t as keen about this show as I am about, say, KT Tunstall earlier this month or Franz Ferdinand in April. But The Go! Team (complete with exclamation point) wasn’t served well by this treatment and I would think twice before going to see them in concert again — or, in fact, another show at the Black Cat when there are so many better venues where I’ve actually enjoyed the show’s ambiance..

Highly disappointing.