Old Person Prom and 5 Songs That Don’t Suck
Concert season delivered two wildly different nights this week: one a three-hour marathon from rock veterans who still have something to prove, the other an accidental comedy show at a Prince tribute act. Plus, five new tracks worth pulling off your algorithm’s leash.
Cleveland Browns Stadium hosted Mannequin Pussy, Queens of the Stone Age, and Foo Fighters, and only one of those bands acted like they deserved to be there. Josh Homme spent most of his set visibly annoyed that the crowd didn’t know the deep cuts, and after “Go With The Flow” finally got a real reaction, he threw out a condescending little aside about the crowd suddenly being happy. Buddy, you’re the middle act on a three-band bill. The audience showed up polite and attentive. Act like a professional and take the win.
Foo Fighters, on the other hand, ripped through a three-hour set with zero signs of slowing down thirty-one years in, mixing deep cuts and older material with newer songs, though nothing from the latest record made the cut. The stadium didn’t sell out, which surprised me. Cleveland loves a nostalgia act, but Blue Dot Fever is apparently real and upper bowl seats running fifty to a hundred bucks probably kept some people home.
The second show is where things got weird. A couple of old friends and I have a tradition of catching a nostalgia act every summer, usually something like Kiss or Judas Priest. This time someone suggested a Prince tribute band called the Purple Experience, playing a Columbus casino “venue” that turned out to be a glorified hotel conference room, complete with round tables and a spaghetti dinner service.
The band itself was fine. Sounded like Prince, looked the part, guitar work was forgettable. But the real show was the dance floor, which sat empty until the second song, then exploded into what can only be described as old person prom. My friends and I couldn’t stop laughing, one of us tapped out for a drink around minute fifty and never came back to his seat, and we eventually walked out mid-set still hearing a perfectly solid “Purple Rain” on our way to the parking lot. Wrong room for the right band, but a great night regardless.
The Songs
Gumshen’s “Burn It Down” opens jazzy, drifts into adult alternative territory, picks up prog rock keyboards and a floating time signature, then lands somewhere grungy on guitar. It shouldn’t hang together, but it does, and if you’re the type who never knows what you want to listen to, this one covers all the bases in a single track.
There’s a Moxy Früvous quality running through Doctor Tongue’s “Dog in the Rain,” not because the band is also from Ontario but because the structure is so delicate. Drums, percussion, and bass do the heavy lifting while everything else adds texture around a beautifully toned vocal, and a guitar solo around the midpoint seals the deal.
Turnpike Troubadours teamed up with mandolin player Sierra Hull for “Feelin Good Again,” a track I found after running into an old bandmate at the Foo Fighters show who’s been deep in bluegrass lately. The song captures that specific feeling of hitting a good stretch in life, and Hull’s playing and voice make the country lean feel like a welcome change of pace rather than a detour.
No Rest for the Spacemen sent over “Ten” directly, and it earned its spot. The lead guitar hook works less like a riff and more like a second melody answering the vocal in every verse, all sitting on top of a densely layered mix of acoustic foundation, electric rhythm and lead, and bass lines that actually do something.
Medium Build’s “Home Depot” came from a listener named Ann, whose algorithm apparently rewired itself after she heard Mr. Record Label. The result lands somewhere between Americana and heartland rock, in the neighborhood of Fantastic Cat or the Wild Feathers, with fiddle and Hammond B3 organ doing a lot of the emotional work. Fixing your algorithm one song at a time might be the new tagline.
