|
| |
|
|
THE 2005 RUMBLE
REVERENDS AND ROADSTEAMERS
|
|
|
|
|
The tension in the air was palpable as the 200 or so left waiting for the announcement of the winner of the 27th annual Rock N Roll Rumble milled about the downstairs room at the Middle East running short on small talk in the absence of the usual "special" guest performer. If nothing else, a guest would have distracted everyone from all the guessing that goes on amid small groups of fans. Tired, drunken chants for the night’s biggest draw — Robby Roadsteamer — struggled to build even the feeblest momentum. So dissimilar were the finalists that, as one scenester put it, "it’s like comparing oranges, bicycles, and computer chips." The evening had opened with the resurrected Reverend Glasseye, an almost painfully eclectic outfit who’d made it out of the first round only as a wild card and then won their semifinal. Boasting a sermonizing singer (whose white-on-white suit and vaguely handlebarred facial hair brought to mind a young Colonel Sanders), a full horn section, upright bass, acoustic guitar, and a drummer who used brushes and mallets, the Reverend were like the hottest thing from the North ever to come out of an ante-bellum South imagined by Nick Cave. But the songs made it hard to tell where they were headed — there was something between an accordionless polka and a waltz, something between a pirate’s lament and a Spanish tango (a landlocked sea chantey?), and something either Shakespearean or Eastern European enough that a Renaissance madrigal or "Hava Nagila" wouldn’t have seemed out of place. So you had to feel for the undernourished boys in Furvis, the shtickless foursome who followed the Reverend with nothing to offer but good, clean, poppy guitar rock. These guys have Beatles in their blood and post-Pavement indie rock on their minds, and that meant Goodwill T-shirts, nice harmonies and guitar hooks, and, well, the whole geek-rock thing, right down to a bassist who kept having to push his glasses back up his nose. How a band as meek and subtly crafty as this made it to the final is anyone’s guess. That left it to joke-metal icon Robby Roadsteamer to steal the show, and he (or they) did, with nasty growling vocals and generic hard rock topped off by a lead guitarist who’s no stranger to Van Halen. Offensive? You bet. But funny? Yeah, as long as you’re open-minded enough to get the humor behind the self-explanatory sexism of "I Put a Baby in You." This time, however, Roadsteamer may have pulled one too many cheap tricks. After sullying the Erna name in a pointless Godsmack putdown, he invited local punk luminary Lenny from Darkbuster up to put the final nail in the coffin of the baby song. So the win, perhaps by default, went to the Reverend Glasseye amid meaningless boos from Robby’s people.
BY MATT ASHARE
|
