Contributor Brieahn DeMeo had a, shall we say, less than stellar Tuesday evening.
Let me start off by saying I love Black Cat. I love the dirty, divey, true music lover feel of the place. I love that when you go, you feel like you are in the company of dedicated music folk, the ones who support the underground bands, and love I them for it. I want to start off with this because I had a less than fantastic time at Black Cat the other night.
I’d been going through a bit of dry spell as far as show-going was concerned until I hit up 2 shows in 3 days recently (Cut Copy and The Guggenheim Grotto), so I was feeling the music bug and decided to take a look at Black Cat’s upcoming schedule. As I clicked away looking for a band that peaked my interest, I stumbled upon British Sea Power. I redirected to their website and took a little listen. “Alright, I’m intrigued.” They have a pretty raw sound, but in a space like Black Cat that’s generally an asset. I called up a friend and we set plans to see the show.
First up was A Classic Education, hailing from Bologna Italy, an international night at Black Cat. Lead vocals and guitar, a tall and lanky kid with some awesome hair took the stage to start. They’ve got a little bit of a 60’s crooner rock band, with a little bit of a Smiths/Shins vibe but with a little something else. I could see them playing my high school prom were I in high school in 1962, and in a totally cool kind of way.
Halfway through their set they covered Sam The Sham’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ which is one I haven’t heard in a while. I kinda loved it. The set built up momentum and by the end I was pretty impressed, and expecting an equally good set from the headliners for the evening, British Sea Power.
Unfortunately this was not the case. I’m not entirely sure what the issue was, but as British Sea Power took the stage it was clear that this wasn’t going to be the most stellar performance. Now I get it, you get into a venue like Black Cat and you don’t expect the amazing acoustics of other larger venues, the space just doesn’t allow for it, but you do hope that you can at least make sense of the music.
The band has an electric violin, which is so amazingly awesome…when you can actually hear it. They even had a trumpet, which I tried desperately to catch a solid note of. The majority of the set was just a giant bubble of noise, I don’t know any other way to describe it. There were a few songs that got it together but for the most part it was hard to figure out what was going on. It was just really rough. I’m not ready to give up on them completely though. I do really like their sound, I’m gonna chalk this one up to a rough performance—and poor sound engineering.
