Imperial Teen. October 20th, 2007 at T.T. The Bear's Place in Cambridge, MA.
I'm sorry to say this was a pretty awful show. It became readily apparent Saturday night that the reason Imperial Teen's latest album (The Hair The TV The Baby & The Band) is so excellent is due in a large part to fine production. On the album, there are so many nuances, so many interesting textures. Live, not so much. Every single song became an egregious boring lapse in time that I will never get back. The problem with the show was that the band members do not really play with strong musicality. They just beat out the chords. And when your music is as simple as Imperial Teen's is, it gets boring really quickly if you're not playing with finesse. Not to mention that their older work isn't that hot -- so when they played songs that already were boring in this new weak context, it was extra awful. I mean, what's with some of their older songs that are literally one chord (and one voicing on guitar -- no change at all) for 3 minutes? At one point in the show, Will walked over to play a piano line. But as the band started, they realized that the piano was set to transpose to a new key. It took them about 5 whole minutes to figure out how to set it back to normal. Now, this piano line was very simple. Is it just me, or shouldn't a musician have been able to just transpose the line to the correct key? Call me a music-student snob, but for me, this summed up the whole night -- they just didn't really know what they were doing.
Imperial Teen - Do It Better (from The Hair The TV The Baby & The Band)
Imperial Teen - Shim Sham (from The Hair The TV The Baby & The Band)
I'm sorry to say this was a pretty awful show. It became readily apparent Saturday night that the reason Imperial Teen's latest album (The Hair The TV The Baby & The Band) is so excellent is due in a large part to fine production. On the album, there are so many nuances, so many interesting textures. Live, not so much. Every single song became an egregious boring lapse in time that I will never get back. The problem with the show was that the band members do not really play with strong musicality. They just beat out the chords. And when your music is as simple as Imperial Teen's is, it gets boring really quickly if you're not playing with finesse. Not to mention that their older work isn't that hot -- so when they played songs that already were boring in this new weak context, it was extra awful. I mean, what's with some of their older songs that are literally one chord (and one voicing on guitar -- no change at all) for 3 minutes? At one point in the show, Will walked over to play a piano line. But as the band started, they realized that the piano was set to transpose to a new key. It took them about 5 whole minutes to figure out how to set it back to normal. Now, this piano line was very simple. Is it just me, or shouldn't a musician have been able to just transpose the line to the correct key? Call me a music-student snob, but for me, this summed up the whole night -- they just didn't really know what they were doing.Imperial Teen - Do It Better (from The Hair The TV The Baby & The Band)
Imperial Teen - Shim Sham (from The Hair The TV The Baby & The Band)
Labels: Show Reviews
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