Sometimes when I listen to the current crop of new popular music, I start to think I'm getting old.
Yet, last night at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage, as I listened in bewilderment to the band Gregor Samsa, I quickly saw that I wasn't the only person lacking appreciation for the band's signature sound, some of whom were significantly younger than me.
Gregor Samsa is a seven-member Richmond, Va.,-based band in the inde rock (independent) genre blended with the sound of ambi rock (ambient music) that reportedly played a recent European tour to packed houses. Their members play percussion, keyboards, guitar, bass, violin, and vocals while a film played on a screen behind them.
The problem with this band is their "ambient" sound isn't even good background music/noise. When they were first introduced and came out on stage, they fiddled with their equipment for a while and some of the instruments started making some soft sounds that seemed so random, I wasn't sure if they were tuning or what. After this "tuning" had gone on for five minutes or so, I, as well as much of the audience, began to shift in our seats and get somewhat uncomfortable.
This soft, unexciting background noise went on for some time. Eventually there was a bit of a crescendo into some actual music that not only could be heard but that actually had vestiges of harmony and recognizable form, but that sound quickly disissipated and the music fell back into the boring "tuning" sound.
Well, after the first song, Ryan was bored and ready to go. All of the Africans/African-Americans in the audience seemed to get up and leave at this point, too. Thinking that the band just had a bad grasp of style, drama, and showmanship, with no one to guide them in laying out a live concert performance, I persevered in sitting through another song. Well, the second song was more of the same; but, it got worse: as the vocalist sang, the violin accompanied her, and the violin was flat! Painfully flat! It drove me crazy! At the conclusion of that song, I was more than happy to move along.
The Millennium Stage is the Kennedy Center's daily free concert series that takes place on a stage in one end of the Grand Foyer. Generally they feature contemporary, folk, international, and other types of music and performing arts which are not usually featured in one of the main (and expensive) performance venues in the Center. The quality and interestingness of the concerts varies widely, though usually the Saturday night performances are pretty good. I guess I'll never know if Gregor Samsa lived up to that reputation.
