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Potential (pə-těn'shəl): ... n. ... 2. capacity for growth or development.
On Wednesday, we saw a band with potential, and lots of it: Benzos. In our preview for the show, we mentioned that Benzos sounded a bit like Amnesiac-style Radiohead. And Wednesday night at the Khyber, they sounded like Radiohead. Here was our problem: they're not Radiohead.
Benzos started out really well - like, really well. After two songs, we looked around the nearly-empty Khyber and actually felt really bad for the band. At the beginning of their set, we were two of literally eight people in the stage room of the Khyber. (And we're pretty sure two of the other people in the room were with the band.) When we went to see The Broken West a few months ago, the crowd was outrageously small, and it clearly affected the band's enthusiasm for the gig. The same thing easily could've happened to Benzos this week. The funny thing is, we're not really sure whether it did or not.
As Benzos's set progressed, it got steadily more jam-oriented. That's all well and good. We like bands that jam out and keep things interesting, the operative words being and keep things interesting. There is no need to spend forty-eight measures repeating a motif, especially if there's no discernible variation in the music for such an extended period of time. It's just not... interesting. We kind of felt like we were in a high school friend's garage listening to some of our buddies jamming out after school one afternoon. It wasn't exactly what we had in mind, and it wasn't really what we thought we were going to get when we'd listened to a couple Benzos songs on MySpace.
The evening was disappointing, mainly because Benzos are talented musicians and when the songs are kept to five minutes or less, they're really good. But when you're a new band who most people have never heard of and you're told you have ten minutes left in your set, you should not say, "Alright, we have time for one more song." No, you had time for three more songs. And we really wish we'd heard three three-minute songs instead of one ten-minute song, and we think we may have dozed off for two minutes in the middle of it. Radiohead can get away with doing a ten-minute experimental jam. In fact, we love it when they do. Over the course of their career, they've built the reputation and fanbase to have earned that right. Benzos hasn't.
This band has a ton of potential. We just hope they can tighten their sound and improve in the future, because Wednesday night showed us that they're not as good as they could be, at least in their live shows.
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