B-Sides Review: Oberhofer and Cloud Nothings.

First off, an introduction to B-Sides for those who don't know. B-Sides is a weekly free concert series at Messiah College. Every Wednesday night the Students Activity Board (SAB) brings in a different band, free of cost to students. Pretty much, it's the best thing ever. I've discovered some of my favorite bands at these (Margot and the Nuclear So and So's, This Will Destroy You, Anathallo, and a host of others). My friend, Ryan, is in charge of booking B-Sides, so occasionally I can talk him into something like The Andreas Kapsalis Trio who played in the fall and were absolutely amazing...

So this semester I'd like to try to write up a brief review of each B-Sides that I get to. With my schedule, this shouldn't be all that hard to write at least something small.

Tonight's B-Sides was the Cloud Nothings opening up for Oberhofer. Usually there's only one band, so I assumed a second would make it twice as good as normal.

Cloud Nothings:
Unfortunately, the Cloud Nothings did not quite live up to the B-Sides reputation. They're a power-pop band out of Ohio. I'm not a huge power-pop band to begin with, so the first impression was a bit rocky to begin with. My first impression was that they were loud. Loud to me means either that they were painfully loud like A Place to Bury Strangers, inappropriately loud for the venue, or just distorted and muddy sounding. I can look past being painfully loud or being inappropriately loud, but these guys just sounded muddy. The guitar work seemed fast but sloppy, the drums just incredibly too loud, and the vocals were muddy and indiscernible. To an extent this is part of the genre, I realize, but it just seemed like all of these aspects were taken too far. That was the first impression. As time wore on, the vocals began to wear on me as well. The wailing and oo's and ah's wore on as a never-ending mess of noise. Rather than hooks that would be waited for with anticipation, these were to cringe over. Overall, this half of B-Sides was just not very enjoyable.

Oberhofer:
Thankfully I trusted Ryan and stayed for the second act, Oberhofer. Though still filled with pop-like hooks, Oberhofer was smooth and soulful, meshing their oo's and ah's into their song structure quite tastefully. Though having a lo-fi appeal to many of their songs, they retained a clean, suave presentation.

Combined with their great stage presence, the music would make you want to just get up and haphazardly dance around. It was fun and entertaining and you could tell that they were having just as much fun. They were jumping around, dancing the whole time. It's always good to see a band that's enjoying their performance.

Another thing that stood out in their set was how they played a brand new song. As a performing musician I can appreciate what it takes to get up and play a something new. To add to the nerve already involved, the new song was so new that the lyrics ended up being improvised. Not being a singer or lyricist, this sounds like performance suicide. However, like the rest of their set, the new song was solid and sounded great.

-Alex