ever the critic

2005-07-28 - 11:28 a.m.

I spent a lot of time last night thinking of how my perspective of live music has changed over the years. I'm certainly way more critical of it than I used to be, though I certainly still enjoy it as one of my favorite things to do. I've been pretty proud of the fact that I have had a pretty good track record of identifying who can really make it and who likely won't. Doesn't mean I don't like stuff that I don't necessarily think will make it...sometimes it's amazing still. But that's unfortunately not the only thing it takes to "make it" as a commmercial success in music. (and, of course, not always required at all for commercial success but I digress)

Last night I heard two bands for the first time: Fat City Reprise and The Clarks.

Fat City Reprise. These guys have a lot of good things going on. They just don't seem to be gelling. Imagine if you will a band aiming for prog rock, but piecing it together with music more suited to 4-chord, radio-ready rock. This in itself isn't bad. But if it were really going to make it in the prog world, it'd need to be some more creative, complex music and focus a bit more on musicianship. If it were really going to make it in the radio-ready world, they need to be more hooky and stop relying so much on the tempo shifts. These guys live in the bridge - not a bad place, but if they could nail the hooks in the chorus they'd be a hundred times more likely to hit.

As for the Clarks, these guys came together much tighter. They know what they do well and they nail it. It's not as varied or ambitious, but it's fun and pulls you in. Rather good standard college/bar band, but nothing all that new.

The more time I spent picking these apart and picking apart why I do what I do and how I came to it, the more I worried about ending up with the pitfalls of the critic. Different than the pitfalls of the professional, but by loving a good thing so much am I just going to kill my love of it?

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