| Before Downtown Tripper Mind began their
satisfyingly febrile set at The Note on Friday, December 19, somebody handed me a flyer
advertising their next show with the slogan "energetic rock and roll." I winced
at the bland cliche and figured they needed a new publicist. A few minutes later, however,
as the young quartet began their set, they proved the line is as apt a description as any
of their classic, spit-fired rock 'n' roll: Their attack is almost exclusively reliant on
good old-fashioned adrenaline and some well-worn (and time-tested) conventions, solidly
played and sung. Lead singer Rob Norris comes across as a more consistently amped-up and
aggressive--and significantly less poetically and vocally distinctive--version of wiry
wunderkind Conor Oberst (of Bright Eyes). Hopped up on some powerful sort of caffeniated
drink (was that a Red Bull T-shirt he was wearing?), the similarly wiry and youthful
Norris led the band through a smoothly played round of aggressive rock-n-roll numbers with
Rolling Stones vigor, a dose of Zepplin grit and a dash of post-Zepplin metal soloing,
plus, here and there, some very welcome slide guitar from nimble lead guitarist David
Bowers, in a late-set dip into sort of Whiskeytown-esque country-rock. The band also
blends in more recent modern alternative rock influences. Smart with rock licks if not
quite whip-smart at songwriting, Norris kept winning back the crowd's occasionally
wanderng attention; unabashedly calling out his own fans whenever chatter welled up. Each
time he did, the crowd responded well, immediately shifting gears from gamming to
cheering. Any temptation on the part of the audience to chatter giddily may have been due
in part to the band's contagious good-times spirt, though the band's lack of outright
lyrical and lick-lical originality proabably also bore partial culpablity. DTM's songcraft
displays more reverence for the most familiar of rock 'n' roll conventions than
imagination ("I want to die," Norris might declare on one song; "I don't
want to die," he says on the very next), and generally the highest verbal ingenuity
to which the band aspires is the odd alteration of a pronoun in this or that age-old
colloquialism ("She's a legend in her own mind"). But (to myself employ a cliche
I've don't think I've ever used in a review before) they can rock. Thus the electric
guitar barrage is engaging enough that if the youthful members of Downtown Tripper Mind
ever decide to write anything more interesting, they probably have a sufficiently sound
musical framework to support it.
Downtown Tripper Mind opened Friday for the solidly polished if unstirringly earnest
Midwestern rock group The Barron James Band, whose sound recalls a harder-rocking,
somewhat more intellectually ambitious and less glossed-up Train. Also on the bill was the
club debut of a new trio of vocalists (and unsinging drummer) called Paper Tree with some
promising--if so far embryonic--adult-alternative songcraft. Their melodic, emotively
ambitious songs suggest a Travis or a (more earnest) Guster with three-part harmonies and
some unusually slick bass work.
All Photos Provided by Connie Vidos
Photography © 2003
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