Trudging through the snow with One Horse Towne

VMR_0014 by V'ron
VMGeorge shines at Linneman's_, a photo by V'ron on Flickr.
When it's nasty cold like it has been, and you're as busy swamped as I am, getting out to see a band is kind of like going to the gym: you really have to work up the energy to do it (not to mention put on enough clots to brave the cold or the snow or whatever the Evil Vortex is going to slam at us), hope the car starts, find a parking place and get there. But, like going to the gym, once there I'm always glad I did it.

And so it goes for the CD release party for One Horse Towne, as OnMilwaukee.com called them, a "trio of veterans", (um, I counted four people on stage). I arrived in time to get the last third of opener Floor Model's set, and having seen Floor Model a couple of weeks ago anyway, I wasn't despondent that I didn't see the whole thing. This gave me time to actually schmooze a bit with the Floor Model guys OHT got ready to go.

If stage placement means anything, I guess you could say that One Horse Towne is "fronted" by George Mirales, a shamefully underrated/overlooked songwriter/guitarist who I've seen in various bands over the years. But this is a very well balanced band of (cliche coming up) Milwaukee alterna-veterans: Tom Tiedjens (do I even have to mention Those X Cleavers anymore?) on bass, Chris Lehmann (who I really wish was mixing the sound at Linneman's and that's all I'm going to say about that) on drums, and pretty much the Dean of Milwaukee Americana, Blaine Schultz, on guitar. Put those guys together, and I expected some jangly, rocking pop americana and that's what I got. But there was an extra layer of special something I couldn't pub my finger on, until my DH Brian leaned over and said to me, "You know what this reminds me of? Those early Frank Black and the Catholics albums!" That was it: melody and lyrically, wise, these are storytelling songs that may or may not be autobiographical, but the effortless musicality of those four guys made these songs pop with that something that made me stay in the room to hear it all despite the fact that I was simultaneous parched with thirst and increasingly worried about the falling snow. This is a good mix of guys who have known each other for years, have played together on-again, off-again too few times and in too few other incarnations, and should keep this lineup going.  They've got a good spark here.

I suspect the snow was keeping people away and only the hardcore fans stuck around for the last band, Dr Chow's Love Medicine, who used the time to try out some new songs on their faithful friends. It was a good Chow set, but I'd been up since six am, and that snow was getting even thicker, so after a couple of choruses of "Nina Hartley" and "Somebody Else" and a new tune or tow, I had to bid adieu.

Unfortunately, since I am married to the Dr Chow guitar player, and I therefore did not pay cover (which I had to explain to the doorman for the eighty somthingth time), I did not receive my complimentary copy of the CD they were promoting Saturday night so I didn't get the luxury of popping it in the car stereo to enjoy on the way home. So, here's the part where I need to yell at One Horse Towne to get with the program and make this thing downloadable though iTunes or Amazon or CD Baby or something. Because nowadays, as much as I'd like to be a vinyl or at least digital hardcopy snob, it's all i can do to just click "buy this album!" and have it in my ever-present iPod (not to mention in the Amazon and Google cloud!) rather than buy the CD, go home, load it into my computer, sync it to the iPod and then have it. That's too much work, guys. Driving in the snow at 12:30 am before the salt trucks were out on I-94 was hard enough. But as I said before, like going to the gym, I'm glad I did it.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hey, I was up since 4 am and stayed for the whole show. Fly
Anonymous said…
What a lovely sharing this is good work.
www.pushpowerpromo.com

Popular Posts