Artists: The Brunettes
Venue: Maxwell’s, Hoboken NJ
Date: October 3, 2007
Working in the field of vision and pattern recognition has its downsides. I start to see connections between bands that often have very little in common. Thus, by hair color I group the Brunettes with Blonde Redhead; while by band make-up and use of clarinet I group them instead with Pretty Girls Make Graves; and by association with their last dual-drum performance, I group them with the Go! Team. Yet none of these are really apt comparisons because unfortunately the Brunettes lack most what distinguishes the other bands I mentioned: the infectious energy that I had (perhaps mistakenly) remembered from their last show. Equally far from the playfulness of the Go! Team as well as the manic aggressiveness of Pretty Girls, the Brunettes sounded like the epitome of compromise: “let’s have a little of this and a little of that, but not too much, or we might lose some fans or accidentally expose some of our real-life marriage or start crying”. And so it was fun, and I almost felt touched at times, and almost like dancing at others, but almost is all it ever came to. And that’s not quite good enough.
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