Generalissimo Eric Hutchinson Is Still Good

If you missed our interview with Eric Hutchinson, which we ran a couple weeks ago, check it out here.

Heading into the Eric Hutchinson (MySpace) show at World Cafe Live, we pretty much knew what to expect from Eric: good banter, strong performance, and a bit of cheekiness that makes you wonder how much of it is shtick and how much is actual ego. It's all part of Eric Hutchinson's charm. We were expecting him to put a smile on our faces. What we didn't expect was how badly we'd need that smile because of the inauspicious start our evening at WCL had gotten off to.

We decided to start our evening with a little dinner before the show. We'd had meals at WCL prior to other shows, so we figured we knew what to expect: serviceable but overpriced for the quality. This time around, we figured we'd eat there anyway, just for convenience's sake. Never, ever, ever will we be eating at WCL again. The food was lousy and our waitress was absolutely atrocious. (We left the requisite 18% tip, but we couldn't help but leave a note on the credit card slip saying "Very inattentive service.") From now on, we'll be grabbing food before we head to the venue for a show. And that's a real shame, because the WCL space really lends itself well to the "dinner and a concert" evening. The food isn't terrible, but the place needs either a price adjustment or a chef change, and it definitely needs a new service manager to retrain the wait staff. Given some changes, it could really be a great place to spend an evening. But we digress...

So once we wrapped up our meal, we settled in to check out Justin Nozuka, a member of the young-guy-with-a-guitar brigade. Time from the beginning of Nozuka's set to the time we were bored out of our minds: 15 seconds. And Nozuka's set didn't improve at all from those first 15 seconds. (Editor Jill says he played one cover song that didn't suck. This Phillyist has no recollection of the song.) On the plus side, the WCL bar had a Troegs Sunshine Pils special running.

Next up was Eric Hutchinson, and we got exactly what we expected from him. Nothing more, nothing less. Given that Hutchinson's album, Sounds Like This, recently received its major-label release, we expected Eric not to venture from the album songs too much, and he didn't, save for one new song, called "Lisa." (The new song was very strong and gives us a lot of optimism for Eric's future.) There was just one negative thing that struck us about Eric's set, and it might be a result of the fact that he's still growing his audience, or it might be a genuine weakness he has. We've seen him a couple times, and it's tough to really distinguish one of Eric's shows from another. They've all been very good, but all been very much the same, though he dropped his Justin Timberlake medley. (Fortunately, however, he kept his "My Girl" into "Ignition" cover.) We'd like to see Eric be more than a fly-by-night phenom going solely on the strength of an endorsement from Perez Hilton. And to do that, he's going to have to inject some more variety into his shows. That being said, we have yet to see Eric deliver a substandard performance, and in the end, that's what matters most in the here and now.

The last act of the night was Marié Digby. Kind of like Justin Nozuka was a boring guy with a guitar, Digby was a boring girl with a guitar. With so many phenomenal women out there grabbing our attention (Yael Naim, Sara Bereilles, and Alison Sudol aka A Fine Frenzy to name a few), there's just no room for error, and Digby isn't even close to the top of the list. She's charming and talented, but her songwriting isn't as refined as many other artists we've heard, and we'd just felt like we heard the same thing from Michelle Branch years ago. C'est la vie.

Image (from Eric Hutchinson's Feb. 2 show at the Troc) by author.