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Drew O'Doherty has great patter. I find his presence and presentation really engaging and fun. His music, however, I find really generi-folky and a bit boring. It's not just me, either; the crowd gives him two songs, and then the buzz of conversation rises. He seems to try singing softer, to get our attention, but then we can't hear him at all. Then he does a few self-deprecating jokes about not playing for too much longer before we get to see Mike Doughty, and then he's done.
Mike Doughty has a keyboard player with him tonight, on classic Wurlitzer electric piano, but even when he's just a guy with a guitar, there's nothing boring about him. He's got all the elements of songwriting down cold: tunes that snake into your brain and stay there; evocative, elliptical lyrics with interesting cadences that dance playfully around the main rhythm of the song; and a great, never-flashy guitar style that seems to wrap rhythm and bass and percussion up in one strummed measure. And he leans heavily on my favorite eight, a 3-3-2 beat that gives a song a certain driving urgency. Dove Man, his "beautiful pianist", (and he is) gets kinda noodly and occasionally a little lost in his solos, but he's an excellent accompanist. And then there's Doughty's jokey, surreal, entirely comfortable and friendly stage presence, and his voice--raspy and a little nasal, it really shouldn't work at all, much less work so well, but he knows just how to use it and to write for it, and leaves me feeling that he's a great singer.
