The Jimi Austin at Hodi’s Hideaway
Topic: Unclassifiable| No Comments »Since my Bob Carnahan, my erstwhile business partner, was busy last Friday, I took my husband Dave with me to Hodi’s Half Note in Fort Collins, Colorado to see The Jimi Austin, a band my business partner Bob and I had been impressed with at the Bohemian Nights festival as part of Fort Collins New West Fest. Sadly, The Jimi Austin didn’t live up to my recollections of summer evenings, but more on that later…
Our evening started with an apparently young band called Black Apples While this band was overall not especially impressive, the drummer (Campbell, according to their merch guy) sang lead vocals and had a really impressive voice. I’d like to hear more from this kid, but their MySpace page (http://myspace.com/blackapplesband is basically blank, so we’ll see…
(BTW… how can you have merch, but a blank MySpace page???)
The next band up was Dualistics out of Denver. This group started with an unsteady ungroove, which got better as they settled into their set, and they ended every song with a weird uncertain I-don’t-know-how-to-stop sort of ending. (Do you think they do that on purpose, or do they just need to work on stopping?) However, their songwriting and arrangement was very good, and their vocal harmonies were very good. They mixed up their instrumentation with some nice keyboard work, and switched the lead vocals around which kept us engaged. Their stage presence and show needs a lot of work, but that seemed to be the theme of the evening…
Checkout their MySpace page (http://myspace.com/dualistics) where you’ll find that their recorded music is excellent. It’s great to see such high quality recording from a local unsigned band.
Also, you can read a review on the Dualistics from Westword at: http://blogs.westword.com/backbeat/2007/11/this_weekend_widowers_astropha.php
Savvant Music CFO/money-man Bob Carnahan and I caught just the very end of The Jimi Austin gig at Bohemian Nights this summer, and we really wanted to see more. Four songs into their act on Friday, and Dave and I were pretty much done. .What I’m not sure is if this was just an off night for The Jimi Austin, or if Bob and I had too much beer and sun this summer…. It was obvious that the sound guy at Hodi’s had too much beer, because lead vocalist Chris Anderson was waving at the wind through the whole set trying to get more volume on his vox mic with no success at all. Apparently the sound guy wasn’t listening either, because Anderson had pretty much lost his voice and was scratchy hoarse by the fourth number. This is why we left, in fact… it was obvious that Anderson was either sick or was struggling so much with the sound (or both) that we weren’t going to see this group’s best stuff, or even their usual stuff.
At least The Jimi Austin gave us some interesting showmanship tonight… not necessarily good as bass player Simon Lee fell on his ass and later knocked over a mic stand attempting not to be a shoegazer bass player – not really good, but definitely not boring! Lee could improve his show by paying more attention to his intonation, as well as his foot work, but the rest of the band played well within their areas of strength.
The drummer, in fact, was really terrific. He plays with an energy that reminds me of Kevin Figuerido of DramaGods, and plays what’s the song needs without throwing a in a lot of unneeded clutter.