Monday, April 1, 2013

Firewater w/Bearshark, Black Cat backstage, Sept 17, 2012

Bearshark was the opener. I had checked them out on Spotify before the show and either there are 2 bands with that name sharing Spotify, or this band played none of their new stuff. On Spotify, the 2012 release was guitar-driven, classic rock sounding with weak vocals. The 2011 stuff was interesting and entirely instrumental. The show was entirely instrumental. I'm a vocals fan, so I was
very bored, and my phone didn't work in the backstage part of Black Cat. I spent my time people watching instead. There was a lady that would have looked perfect on the set of a Star Wars prequel. And a guy whose profile belonged on the cover of a fantasy novel – that guy looked like he could kick elf butt and sweep a heroine away from a dragon. There was also a strangely androgynous looking older person with long hair. I thought for sure it was a man until she took her jacket off. There were lots of gen-Xers in the crowd.

I didn't do my homework on Firewater before buying the ticket. I discovered them around 2009 and am exceedingly fond of a few singles from their 2007 release, but they haven't toured since I discovered them, so I was excited. I didn't realize how OLD the main guy is. He looked and sounded like a man in his 50's (maybe early 60's) who's rocked hard his entire life. The vocals just weren't
that great. Not horrible, but weaker and less committed than I expected. The backup band was a bunch of guys in their 20s and 30s who were excellent, but there was almost no energy on stage and the lead guy didn't like the lights in his face, so you couldn't see much, it was crowded and hot, and I was behind lots of tall people. The music was good (not great), but it didn't overcome the negatives for me, so I bailed after 45 minutes. I won't go see the again.

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