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Boring OtR
> and now, for your discussion: after the show, i was talking to some friends
> who feel that over the rhine has become, well, boring - similar to watching
> paint dry. this comes from people who saw them back in the day. having not
> seen them then, i can't make any comment. i've never found them boring -
> wondering if there are people on the list who can explain this attitude
> (opening the can and letting the wriggling things inside spill all over the
> ground).
Well, as someone who saw them a few times "back in the day", I'll pick up a
couple of the wriggling things. I don't think they're boring now, but I think
I can empathize with what your friends were saying. I would say OtR now is
relatively controlled. The main thing that drew me to band, before I met the
people involved, was I perceived this tension in the music. I think in
retrospect it was a manifestation of the tension among the band members that
ended up driving them apart, but just from what I heard, there was this
incredible mix between tightly controlled, heartbreakingly beautiful songs, and
wild, irrepressible energy that could break out and go in unexpected
directions. In general (with notable exceptions), the control tended to
dominate the records, and the wild really came out when they played. The
strength that came from that diversity is really what pulled me in to become a
rabid fan. While I would not say that the strength is all gone (when Karin
belted out TWCW or IRH at the Taft, I got shivers down my spine), the balance
is definitely tipped. I also want to be clear I'm not saying K&L were all
about control and R&B were all about wild energy; that would be unfair to all
four of them. But the fact is that when I go to OtR and Monk shows now, they
touch different parts of my psyche that old OtR shows used to envelop together.
It's a fact that no one was up dancing at either Taft show I've been to, and I
know people were at the 1996 Emery show. I think of OtR now not so much as
music to dance to, but as music to lie back and let yourself get carried away
by. I could see that if someone were looking for that wild energy of 1994,
they might think the show is boring. I just see it as different.
That's my take, anyway, biased and imperfect as it is.
--
Don Smith Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
"Some people dream of fortunes, while other people dream of cookies."
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