No matter how good you are, you’re always at the mercy of the sound system. Two very good bands, The Joggers and Georgie James worked a capacity crowd at the Black Cat backstage last night. Unfortunately both performances suffered from technical difficulties and, in the case of the Joggers, a bonus hangover.
Hailing from Portland, Oregon, the Joggers make a broken bottleneck meets deliverance kind of rock. In 2003, the band released their debut LP, Solid Guild, with a title that confirmed their workmanlike approach to music. The album delivered charmingly slack vocals, innovative guitar work, and even a throwback to R. M. Hornsby’s choral experiment, Sherburne (more on this later). They turned the hooks way up on With a Cape and a Cane, their sophomore album, to acclaim; they are a now a band “going somewhere” in the press.
Which made last night’s appearance at the Black Cat both exciting and ultimately disappointing. You could say The Joggers’ signature rapid-fire high notes and cacophonous jams were the exact ingredients mixed precisely to make the backstage audio system conk out. Consequently, their impressively refined and precise sound was reduced to the garage band buzz of weird noise and drums. For the audience it became an exercise in either a) using your memory to fill in the spots you couldn’t hear or b) begging your ears to not divorce you.
It didn’t help that they were hung-over on Thursday – from drinking on Tuesday. And while everybody has been guilty of that, not everybody gets to perform in front of a packed house (while trying to live up to media buzz). The hangover hit Singer Ben Whitesides’ vocals and Jake Morris’ percussion the hardest, leaving the former rather crusty throughout the performance and the latter a tad too loud. Granted the amps were working against them, but you couldn’t help but notice when Darrell and Dan set up a soft bounty of choral harmonies that Ben crushed with wailed effusions on “Hot Autism.” Sadly, this same song with the same guys sounds great on album, but on stage they failed to execute (to use the March Madness argot). Their jams roared, but failed to articulate the envisioned soundscape. The Joggers are great, but under the weight of alcohol and a rebel sound system, they mostly sounded like any other band.
