This past week a friend was visiting from out of town. Austin being known for its live music, he wanted to check out some sort of live music. So we looked at the list of bands playing around town last night. Of course, we had no idea who was who, so Google was our friend. My friend also suggested to just pick a venue I liked and we could just go there. That helped, so I looked at The Saxon Pub. A band called Black Bone Child was playing. Found their website, listened to some music samples, and figured that wasn’t too bad a choice.

They hit the stage shortly after 8:00 PM and just played song after song.

Musically we dug the band. They seemed pretty tight, had a good sound, good groove, some soul. All things sounded good enough to want to investigate them more afterwards (e.g. buy a CD and spin it for a while at home). We left before they finished so we didn’t have a chance to buy a CD (don’t even know if they had any for sale), but I’m looking at them this morning at the iTunes music store.

My friend commented that nothing about the band stood out… like there was no melody that stuck in his head such that he’d be humming it on the way out the door and still playing in his head the next morning. I’ll agree with that on two counts. First, every song felt like it was a study in the key of E. That is, it’s very guitar-driven music and so that 6th low open E string often becomes the foundation for most rock songs and these guys didn’t sound any different. While certainly there was some good songwriting, some different structuring, there was something about the overall tone that felt the same from song to song. Things just seemed to blend one into the next. Which brings up the second point: everything was a blended blur.

I recall hearing big successful bands saying how back in their early club days they didn’t play like they were playing in front of 20 people, they played like they were up in the arena playing in front of 20,000 people. If I closed my eyes last night my ears would enjoy what I heard. But since my eyes were open, they wanted to see something too. There was nothing going on up on stage. In fact, one of the guitar players had a look on his face like he didn’t want to be there and just wasn’t into what he was doing. Come on! Smile! Show some facial expressions. Get into your playing! Don’t the band members interact with each other any? I don’t expect some KISS pyro show, but you can at least be a little alive up there. If you’re having a bad day, get over it and don’t show it on stage because you’re there to do a job, put on a show, and entertain us. If I just wanted to hear the music, I could spin your album on the stereo at home, but I’m out to see live music so let’s see some live music. Talk with the crowd some. Give some interaction. Assume that since you’re an unsigned and up-and-coming band that there’s probably at least one person in that audience that has no idea who you are and what your songs are, so maybe introduce them so we can know the name (maybe we liked that song and now that we can know the name it’ll help us want to seek it out again). Oh, and don’t mumble either… when the singer finally said the name of the band (after 3 songs) he was so quick and a bit mumbled that if I didn’t know the name of the band I would have been asking “what??!?!?! who?!”.  And if you have merch for sale, say so.

So, they have the music part down pretty well, but they really need to work on the live show part, IMHO. Give people a reason to want to come and see you live.

Don’t get me wrong. I overall enjoyed it. Found myself tapping my feet and digging the tunes. I hope the best for them. I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing them again, but I’ll give them a little time in hopes they’ll work on their show a bit.