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The Plan is uncharacteristically deserted tonight. It's okay, these things happen, it all evens out, etc. etc., but still, it's seriously underattended, and Raised by Tigers are here all the way from Texas. I feel bad for them until they start playing; then I just feel bad. They are a guitar-and-drums two piece, but there is more going on in their prerecorded backing tracks than they play live. It's pretty much impossible for me to even be fair about playing to canned tracks, much less kind; they could have more easily and effectively mailed a CD. The canned bass really dominates, and I can't tell how much of the guitar is live. (And I don't really need to start ranting about live drummers playing along to drum machines again, do I?) I try really hard to focus on his vocal, but it's kind of a weak, meandering thing, mixed fairly low, and there's neither intensity nor compelling melodies. There's very little that's poorly done here, exactly, but there's just very little being done here at all.
Since the room is not exactly crowded, Clickers set up on the floor in front of the stage. They then proceed to give the ten or twenty people who gather around them possibly the best Clickers set I've ever heard. They are at their best when flying without a net, and tonight they seem to have such a relaxed, fuck-it-let's-just-play attitude that the little jams which connect song to song seem like compositions in their own right. Their voices sound wonderful, they are miraculously untroubled by technical issues of any kind (particularly impressive given the mixing challenges presented by their playing out on the floor--props to Chris for a great job with the sound tonight), and they play a great new song with an oddly slow, contemplative section in the middle. They close by playing my favorite song of theirs, "Shotgun On All Things to Come," with its beautifully intricate rim-clicking rhythm section that makes me twitch and shimmy like epileptic Jell-o. It rarely gets played these days, and pretty much makes my night.
Travis Morrison explains that his band still haven't decided what they're called, so for the moment he's Travis Morrison and they're his band. What little I've heard about them hasn't been promising, so they are initially helped by the expectations game--my first impression is that they're not that bad. They're kind of poppy, and kind of middle-of-the-road, with a percussionist fleshing out the rhythm nicely. He proves to the the star of their show for me, on whatever instrument he plays as they rotate through a variety of configurations: he's a fluid, graceful percussionist; a talented, interesting drummer; a raucous rhythm guitarist; and a decent keyboard player. The other members of the band contribute more or less depending on what they're doing on any given song, so that some configurations work better for me than others. The bassist is quite a good keyboard player, but he gives the songs a lot more body when he plays bass. The main drummer is steady but rather shockingly boring, rarely varying from kind of a dumb little four-beat, but he's quite a good percussionist and not bad on keyboard either. As for Travis, he's a relaxed and cheerful frontperson, with a nice voice and great, friendly presence, and his guitar ranges from pedestrian to really impressive. So they're really all over the map. At its very worst, it sinks to a kind of smooth alt-lounge cheese, which isn't done badly but doesn't really appeal. At its very best, it rises to the level of quirky, driving power-pop.
