Joe's New Blog

Nothing special, this is just my third effort at writing a blog about my life and what goes on in it: Hobbies, cooking, work, maybe the occasional book or DVD review, and so forth. Nothing really noteworthy, but this is sort of a little subset of my world...

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Lions at Dan's Silver Leaf, Saturday, April 19

On my first fully free weekend here in Denton, my girlfriend and I decided to get out of the house and check out something musical here in town. After reading through several descriptions and reviews of bands, we settled on going to Dan’s Silver Leaf and seeing Lions, an Austin-based band that was described in a newspaper review as having a 60s and 70s sort of vibe with a 90s fevor [sic]. We weren’t really sure if that was supposed be “fever” or “fervor,” but we figured it was the latter.

The opening band, whose name I didn’t catch, had a couple of catchy tunes going right after we first came in. They, like Lions, were a quartet, the usual lineup of drums, bass, and two guitars, with one of the guitarists doing what should be called singing, but which was primarily a cross between shouting and screaming to my ears. The singer/guitarist had pretty obviously had a bit much to drink, as my girlfriend leaned over at one point and told me something that he’d said. I told her that I understood what he had said, and she responded with, “Oh, I didn’t know you could translate Drunk that well.” Unfortunately, after the first couple of songs they played after we arrived, they seemed to go into several songs which were just extended jams. It pretty much seemed like they were just holding a public practice. If they could have maintained that catchy energy they had at first, it would have been a pretty decent show. As it was, not something I’d really care to pay to see again.

The headliners, Lions, got their equipment set up very efficiently and started their set only ten minutes or so after the first band left the stage. I could kind of see initially how they could be described a bit as having a 60s and 70s vibe. The girlfriend described them as being something like a cross between Led Zeppelin and Rage Against the Machine. For my part, I thought the 60s/70s part was more like the Who than like Zeppelin. In any case, Lions, too, sort of devolved into something of a jam band after the first few songs, primarily just riffing over a fairly solid rhythm section. They did seem to have a bit more structure to their material than the first band, but they definitely didn’t really cut it for me. Maybe their newly-released EP sounds better, but their live show struck me as little more than really, really loud.

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