Romantica at St. Olaf College

I'm very lucky to attend a college that is close enough to a major city (two, truth be told) which allows us to get a wide variety of musical acts to perform on campus relatively regularly. This weekend we were fortunate enough to book two shows on two consecutive nights, beginning this evening with a group from Minneapolis called Romantica. Owing to the twangy indie/alt-country that the band plays you wouldn't know that the lead singer, Ben Kyle, originally hails from Belfast except for his accent. The rest of the group are from the U.S.

Bridging the gap bands like The Wallflowers or Counting Crows and Ryan Adams (all of whom are much better than Romantica), Romantica are to the Minneapolis-St. Paul country scene what Quietdrive is to the Minneapolis-St. Paul pop-punk scene. Well loved and receiving more and more attention nationwide due to their very safe, straight-ahead songwriting sensibilities.

I arrived at the show a little late and, frankly, I don't think I missed too much. Romantica are good musicians and good songwriters, they're just redundant. Every song began to blend into the previous one with only the occasional tuning or "thank you" to break up a set of songs. Kyle has a good voice but he never quite explored his full range the way I was hoping. Every so often he would hit a higher note in a more "intense" moment of a song, but for the most part he stuck to a safe range. This wouldn't necessarily have been a bad thing if he had opened his eyes once in awhile during the songs. After the third song I grew tired of watching him emote over twangy guitars and a rather boring rhythm section.

The rest of the band didn't do much to interest me either. While Kyle is the attractive lead singer with an acoustic guitar, the lethar jacket-clad Luke Jacobs was the gritty bringer-of-twang, switching back and forth between electric guitar and pedal steel guitar. Rounding out the lineup was bassist James Orvis (a chubby bassist - imagine that), and Tony Zaccardi on drums. For the most part they stayed on their respective parts of the stage, going through the motions. Again, it wasn't that it was bad, it was that there seemed to be no live-show spontinaity.

The best moments came when Kyle explored the upper regions of his vocal range or when Jacobs was allowed to do something interesting on the guitar. However, the low point of the show came when Kyle announced, "This is is a Leonard Cohen song," just before launching into a cover of "Hallelujah." Considering that everyone and their little sister has covered the song, I hope that Romantica don't think that theirs is original (click the link - the song has "been recorded more than 170 times for release...").The song itself is beautiful and can be incredibly haunting. Unfortunately, Romantica did not pull it off.

Romantica had been talked up to me by a number of my friends but I found myself feeling rather let down. Perhaps it was simply this particular performance, though I have a hard time believeing that they could be animated at all. I can only hope that tomorrow's performance by California band Tartufi is more interesting.