Battle of the Bands: Tuesday Night

After last night's lackluster line-up, I had high hopes for tonight. With only five judges this time, my vote would carry even more weight. Only one other judge besides me is coming every night. She's a pretty cool girl and we plan to swap local music mp3s tomorrow night.

The Eden Experience opened the night with a movie screen in front of the stage showing various commercial clips. Meanwhile, they played a song in the background that had nothing to do with the video being shown. Still not sure why they did that. Anyway, the screen went up after the first song, revealing a fairly decent experimental indie band. The singer had a real sincere, warbley voice that I kind of liked. He looked like Moby.

Scorecard:

Musicianship: 6
Song Writing: 6
Crowd Response: 4
Stage Presence: 7
Vocal Performance: 6
Total Score: 29

Deadlocked sounded like a bad Chump cover band. Local bands should never have cover bands. Everything bad about the 90's rap/rock fad came to a screeching climax. Amazingly, it was this band that took the audience vote tonight. They were just terrible.

Scorecard:

Musicianship: 3
Song Writing: 2
Crowd Response: 4
Stage Presence: 5
Vocal Performance: 1
Total Score: 15

Yet another pop-punk band in Rated Hero. Solid playing and singing, just a thousand other pop-punk bands out there doing the exact same thing.

Musicianship: 7
Song Writing: 5
Crowd Response: 5
Stage Presence: 7
Vocal Performance: 5
Total Score: 29

With a tie on my hands and no band I liked, it was once again up to the final band to win it or lose it. Mid-Wives Crisis took the stage in darkness, opening with a crazy glam metal number belting from a singer wearing glitter make-up and a dandy white outfit. Hooray!!! Something different!

The first song wasn't very good, but everything improved by leaps and bounds after that. The singer seriously looked like a rock star playing in a giant arena. How these guys ended up in Provo I'll never know. The style wavered across several genres, none of which I can think up names for. I was shocked to see a band this good after wading through so much crap. Made my whole night.

Musicianship: 9
Song Writing: 10
Crowd Response: 7
Stage Presence: 10
Vocal Performance: 9
Total Score: 45

The scary thing is, I now had something invested in the outcome. I was prepared to be truly disappointed if these guys didn't advance to Saturday night. After hearing that the audience vote went for Deadlocked, I was glad I had rated them so low to counteract it. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when Mid-Wife Crisis was announced as the winner. Excited to see them again. Home at midnight.

Typing up my blog and listening to a CD some guy game me from his band: De La Vega. Being a judge, people think I still have contacts in the scene, which I don't--well, not really.