Originally posted by Stuart Ransom Miller:
Agreed.
A band that tried this the last couple of years and has now gone the other way, Marah, put out a great new album - much more grittier than their previous attempts to move to pop. Check it out.
I'm seeing Marah tomorrow night - Love these guys.
One of the best RnR shows you can see.
"Demon of White Sadness" is a nice return to form:
http://www.myspace.com/marahusa I've raved about Marah on here before. I like what Nick Hornby said after seeing them in a small U.K. pub:
"Five or six years ago, a friend in Philly introduced me to a local band called Marah. Their first album had just come out, on an indie label, and it sounded great to me, like the Pogues reimagined by the E Street Band, full of fire and tunes, and soul and banjos. There was a buzz about it...and it looked like they were off and away. Writing this down, I can suddenly see the reason why it didn't happen for them, or at least, why it hasn't happened yet. The band is young, but their referents, the music they love, is getting on a bit, and in an attempt to address this problem, they attempted a noisy modern rock album. They succeeded in alienation, but not in finding a new audience, so they have been forced to retreat and retrench and rethink. At the end of the Fiddler's Elbow show they passed a hat around, which gives you some indication of the level of retrenchment going on. They'll be OK. Their next album will be spectacular, and they'll sell out Madison Square Garden, and you'll all be boasting that you read a column by a guy who saw them in the Fiddler's Elbow. Anyway,
the two shows I saw that week were spectacular, as good as anything, I've seen with the possible exception of the Clash in '79, Prince in '85 and Springsteen on the River tour. Dave and Serge, the two brothers who are to Marah what the Gallaghers are to Oasis, played the Fiddler's Elbow as if it were Giants Stadium, and even though it was acoustic, they just about blew the place up."
