By Richard Provost
Well, it was Night 4. This is usually the point where a week of BotB starts feeling a month long, and, as someone who has been around the block a time or two, it was easy to spot the people who had been there all week. I’ve always felt that the bands later in the week had a bigger disadvantage as the common gimmicks (“How you doing Provo?!?!”, “Everybody jump!”, the thing every young band thinks is cool where they make the audience crouch down before the drop) just stop working on the judges and even some of the audience. It was my first night this week, and I was excited to be there, but it still felt like night 4, and I think this energy may have impacted some of the performances.
The By and By
I love a band that knows who they are, and that’s exactly what The By and By are. That’s true even if it’s a little hard to describe them, which won’t stop me from trying. They feel a bit like if Marty Robbins was the lead singer of Led Zeppelin (also – did you know he was a NASCAR driver?! *The more you know*). Sticking with the Marty theme, they feel as if Marty McFly went back in time to play guitar for a western band (your kids are gonna love it). I hate myself for this one, but they honestly are a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll.
Having all met while working on the rock opera Deep Love, it’s not a surprise that The By and By is built around a concept album intended to tell a story. It also wasn’t surprising that they were very tight and great performers. They certainly set the standard of professionalism high for the following bands.
All this being said, they were the beginning of a recurring pattern for the rest of the night, which was that every band seemed to have some nagging issue that took away from their performance. For The By and By, it was a tuning issue for about 60% of the set. It felt like the bass (could have been a guitar. H*ck, it could have been the keyboard; I’ve seen it happen. Twice.) was just off. Somewhere near the end of the set it seemed to get corrected, and while it was a minor issue that was probably felt rather than heard by most, I think it’s what unfortunately made a great set a good set.
The Tyler Gould Band
I’ll lead with The Tyler Gould Band’s nagging issue, because it started in sound check. Their guitarist had a harsh, bright tone, that just was not working in the room. Once the music started, the tone felt a little more at home, and I think we all settled in. Tyler Gould has a great voice, and the band was a great foundation for him. Their last song, “Tainted” is a legitimately good song. Part of what made that song so effective last night was that the previously mentioned guitar tone was tamed quite a bit, and Tyler switched from electric to acoustic guitar. Honestly, this was a really good sound, and I think they should explore this space more.
While the guitar tone was the nagging issue, the biggest detractor for me personally was their performance. I don’t want to give intentions to their decisions, but I think it’s fair to speak as to how it made me feel; this isn’t a dig, this is feedback.
To me it felt like a group of guys doing not what they wanted to do, but what they thought a band like them should do. Everything from the way they moved on stage down to the sunglasses and not one, but two Stevie Ray Vaughn style hats, felt almost like they were pretending to be a different band rather than themselves. Honestly, this aspect of things is so hard to figure out, and I see it a lot. Between this and the harsh guitar tone, I think they had a harder time connecting with the audience. All in all though, there’s a lot here to like. This is the type of band that I think could come back in a year and make a big splash after making some tweaks and figuring some things out.
Welcome Home Sundance
So, this is what pop would have evolved into if Owl City had been more influential. I like it. Welcome Home Sundance was certainly the most unique and experimental band of the night with a sound full of synths, arpeggiators, and vocal effects. Their arrangements, especially percussively, were interesting and fun. Out of all the bands from last night, Welcome Home Sundance was the one I listened to after. Also, they had a drum solo. That’s always fun.
I started writing out an analysis of their performance, when it all started to sound familiar to me, and I realized I wrote a lot of the same things I did when I covered their performance at the Velour Winter 2022 BotB. Go there for a recap, as I think it still represents a lot of my thoughts with WHS. Since I’ve got the space, I’ll instead take a brief moment to address my gripes with BotB as a whole, and how bands and the community often respond to it.
Velour holds, without a doubt, the best BotB I’ve ever been in involved in. It’s so fun every six months, and it’s a great place for bands to network with other bands, be heard by influential people in the scene, and get coverage from us. It’s amazing. However, BotB in general aren’t really great at doing what they supposedly are meant to do, which is to find the best band. They do a great job at finding the best band for BotB. And while Corey Fox has been really smart about making it as objective as possible by setting specific criteria for grading and getting a bunch of judges in order to average things out, a BotB often ends up being more about creating a great moment on stage than it is about being “better” than the other bands. It’s often simply the most fun or most energetic band that takes it on a night because, as objective as we all may try to be, we are all swayed by our emotions.
The thing I would like to impress upon the bands and the community at large is that winning or losing battle of the bands means very little. And while statistically speaking, you’re about as likely to win a Grammy if you’ve won American Idol as you are if you’ve won Velour’s BotB, winning is not an indicator of being great, and losing is not an indicator of not being great. Regardless of the results, keep working, get feedback, reiterate and improve.
Rant over, back to Welcome Home Sundance. It’s time to play “What weird thing haunted this set?” While very entertaining, effortless, and interesting musically, WHS struggled with their vocal effects. They sounded great and were used in a musical way, but they often led to vocals getting buried in the mix and being almost inaudible at times. Losing lead vocals can leave the listener a bit lost without a focal point, and I think they lost judges and audience members at times because of this.
I do want to mention their song “I Am,” which was an absolutely perfect song in their set involving naturally occurring crowd response and a satisfying build to end the song. It’s the type of moment that made me write down the lyrics so I could look it up later.
Avintaquin
There was certainly excitement during Avintaquin’s sound check. Maybe it was all the family that showed up for them, maybe it was people confusing Hyrum Peatross for Benson Boone. Certainly, it had something to do with those vocal harmonies that only come from singing together for years. I’m sure siblings Hyrum, Liam, and Grace did so, as they grew up on a farm together.
And those vocals were the wind beneath their set’s sails for sure. (Imagine being in that family and not being able to sing.) Their set was full of plenty of “Ooooh” responses from the audience that just come out of you when you hear something good.
This band is so close to figuring it out, and when they do, they’ll be unstoppable. While maybe they aren’t quite fully comfortable on stage, they aren’t pretending to be anything but themselves. Where I think they currently lack is in their songwriting and arranging. Many of their songs were what I would describe as aggressively major. I don’t believe we heard a minor chord until their “sad” song about three or four songs into their set, and even that sounded pretty happy. There’s a level of sharpening their taste that I think has to happen, and that’ll come with time and a focused effort on pushing their own boundaries artistically. Avintaquin, please sing sad songs. It’s okay to be sad. It makes the rest of us happy.
What was Avintaquin’s nagging issue you ask? Honestly, I think they were trying too hard to be energetic and fun for the purpose of the competition. I’ve seen them before, and I was much more impressed the other times. My advice: lean into what makes you great and unique, and don’t try and win the moment. Show who you are and win or lose with that. You’ll win over real fans, and you’ll be happier with the result either way.
Results
It only took a few minutes of deliberation and calculation before host John Schultz was on stage with the results. He started off by complimenting the audience for being respectful and involved, and I realized that there wasn’t a single use of the infamous Velour ShushTM the whole night, and that’s pretty incredible. Schultz informed everyone that every single band led in at least one of the five categories, which shows how tight the result was. At the end of a night full of a lot of talent (but oddly not the best performances) it was a well-deserved win for Avintaquin.
Avintaquin will be joining HASHA, Swerved By Blondes, Lonely Heights, and tonight’s winner on Saturday for the Final.
Velour’s Summer 2024 Battle of the Bands continues tonight as Hockey House, The Bombshell Flowers, Lazy Loners and Kลmas compete for the last spot in the finals! Doors open at 7:30 PM and tickets are $12. Until then, you can check out Welcome Home Sundance’s track “I Am” below!