Savvant Music

Since my Bob Carnahan, my erstwhile business partner, was busy last Friday, I took my husband Dave with me to Hodi’s Half Note in Fort Collins, Colorado to see The Jimi Austin, a band my business partner Bob and I had been impressed with at the Bohemian Nights festival as part of Fort Collins New West Fest. Sadly, The Jimi Austin didn’t live up to my recollections of summer evenings, but more on that later…

Our evening started with an apparently young band called Black Apples. While this band is still in the early phases of their development, the drummer (Campbell, according to their merch guy) sang lead vocals and had a really impressive voice. I’d like to hear more from this kid.

The next band up was Dualistics out of Denver. While parts of the show weren’t without problems, this group’s songwriting and arrangement was very good, and their vocal harmonies were very good. They mixed up their instrumentation with some nice keyboard work, and switched the lead vocals around which kept us engaged.  Their stage presence and show needs a lot of work, but that seemed to be the theme of the evening…

Checkout their MySpace page (http://myspace.com/dualistics) where you’ll find that their recorded music is excellent.  It’s great to see such high quality recording from a local unsigned band.

Also, you can read a review on the Dualistics from Westword at: http://blogs.westword.com/backbeat/2007/11/this_weekend_widowers_astropha.php

Savvant Music CFO/money-man Bob Carnahan and I caught just the very end of The Jimi Austin gig at Bohemian Nights this summer, and we really wanted to see more.  Unfortunately, this was something of an off night for The Jimi Austin.  Lead vocalist Chris Anderson was waving at the wind through the whole set trying to get more volume on his vox mic with no success at all.  Apparently the sound guy wasn’t listening either, because Anderson had pretty much lost his voice and was scratchy hoarse by the fourth number. It was obvious that Anderson was either sick or was struggling so much with the sound (or both) that we weren’t going to see this group’s best stuff, or even their usual stuff, so we took off and decided to catch The Jimi Austin another night.

At least The Jimi Austin gave us some interesting showmanship tonight… not necessarily good as bass player Simon Lee fell on his ass and later knocked over a mic stand attempting not to be a shoe-gazer bass player – not really good, but definitely not boring!

The drummer for The Jimi Austin was really terrific.  He plays with an energy that reminds me of Kevin Figueiredo of DramaGods, and plays what’s the song needs without throwing a in a lot of unneeded clutter.

We’ll have to give The Jimi Austin another look when they have decent sound and everybody is healthy.  Our initial impression this summer was very good, but we couldn’t find that spark last Friday with the poor sound and Anderson’s failing voice.