Tear the roof off the sucker

January 18, 2002

So, I went to two concerts over the last two nights. Flickerstick at Irving Plaza and The Roots at Avery Fisher Hall.

The presentation at the Flickerstick show was great. the sound and lights were well done, but the concert lacked spontenaity and passion and their set was only about 75 minutes long. The Roots played a 2.5 hour set, but the sound was painfully loud. It was pathetic that in a venue with good acoustics I could barely make out what Black Thought was rhyming. The production was as amateurish as Devils broadcasts on Fox Sports.

But the Roots concert was sick. They had all sorts of guests up on stage, and the solo turns at the end were highlighted by ?uestlove's solo and Rahzel and Scratch doing dueling vocal effects. In contrast, Flickerstick was all about "hey, we're rock stars now!" They had a big tour bus all new gear, but they approached the songs in a way to make them sound very generic. While the reworked "Got a Feeling" was much better done than the old way, 'Chloroform' and 'Coke' sounded much less distinctive and much more like any other song on modern rock radio. Beautiful was just a mess. These guys could be good, but they need to work making their sound more recognizably unique, not less so.