Tonight I’m headed over to the good ol’ Doug Fir Lounge to catch Nouvelle Vague, an excellent group of French musicians who take classic New Wave songs and turn them into Bossa Nova pop. They’re a blast! I saw them this time last year at Holocene, another Eastside club here in Portland. … continue reading this entry.
Archive for September 6, 2006
Holcombe Waller at The Doug Fir Lounge
Last Thursday night I went with a friend to the Doug Fir (yes, I go there a lot) to see some local talent. We missed the first opener and left before the headliner. This left us with the middle act, a guy named Holcombe Waller. As he started to play it occurred to me that I’d seen him before somewhere. Where, where, where had I seen this guy?! It was driving me nuts!
My friend didn’t recognize him at all. Had I seen him around the neighborhood? If so, my friend would have recognized him too. Was he in a different band? Climber maybe? As he moved about the stage he looked even more familiar. The way he moved was familiar. Arrrgh! It was so distracting! Since there’s no T-Mobile service in the club, I couldn’t even google him.
But on to the music, which wasn’t bad, but didn’t make me jump for joy either. I wasn’t keen on his accompanying vocalist as I felt like their voices didn’t meld very smoothly most of the time. Separately, they were both unique and good. Together, not great. His lyrics tended to be repetetive, the point apparently being to show off the range of his falsetto vocal stylings. I felt like he really enjoyed the sound of his own voice, which was quite lovely at times, but it made his performance feel very insular. He seemed very self-aware and focused on what he was doing, until the last song, when he let loose a bit.
