Here’s my state of the union
Jams are sounding good lately. I was critical about a month ago because I felt like a lot of the jams were missing dynamics and jamming in the same key/feel for too long, but I’ve been pretty happy with a lot of the jams in the past month. I listened to 10/1 Breaker earlier and I thought it caught a coherent sound pretty quickly, and felt intentional, so I’m currently judging all improv over the past month by that jam, and by that metric the improv has been good. Lots of New Deal/Moos style sounds at UMBowl.
Vocals are starting to improve too. They figured out that Joel can just sing some of Kris or Jake’s parts when he’s not singing anything, and Joel is much better at backup vocals than he was when I first started seeing them. Still plenty of work to do but they’re going in the right direction. Feels like Scotty (and/or the sound mixer) haven’t decided whether or not to commit fully to Kris’ vocal parts so he sings a lot of them and you can sorta hear it but he doesn’t project them like Lead Tenor I Kris Myers. Scotty is a good singer in his own right, but Kris’ vocal shoes are hard to fill. It’s pretty funny anyway the implied assumption that he should sing all of Kris’ parts because Kris played the drums and Scotty plays the drums. There’s no reason that needs to be the case, but it seems like the path of least resistance when they have so many other things to spend their time practicing right now
Many of the songs that were written for 2 guitars sound like they’re missing a part, because they are, and that is never going to be solved unless/until they find somebody to play those parts. Some songs you can have Joel take a bigger role to fill the harmony, but for some songs the whole point is that it’s two guitars harmonizing. Triple Wide isn’t even a big dual-guitar song but both guitar parts feel “required” for the song to be complete. They can be the best possible version of the 5 piece and they will still have this problem for a big part of their catalog, because those songs have more parts than people to play them. Like if you go see a symphony orchestra and the entire viola section doesn’t show up or something.
On the bright side, we’re lucky to be getting any live music at all in this economy with gas this high, so getting the 5 piece with a limited catalog is certainly better than nothing (nothing at all)
