Semi Finals (Round 2)

[Author's Note: [Author’s note: If this is your first time visiting the UMC blog, you might want to check out the INTRODUCTION first.]

And the winners are…

Anger is a Gift and Detroit Underground! Congratulations you two bands who are totally different from each other but both rock in your own ways! We’ll see you in the finals.

So, wow. What a great night of music. All the bands were excellent. Also, with respect to the vitriol dispatched upon the judges, the night went a lot smoother than last week. Not only did we only receive a handful of angry comments by disgruntled fans (compared with the dump-truck-full we received last week), but the losing bands themselves were beyond gracious. The guys from both Gin Pistons and Old School came up to us, shook our hands, said “Thank you,” and smiled the whole time.

I can’t tell you how much those smiles meant to us. It’s like the smiles were saying, “Hey man, we get it. It’s just a game, and we lost… this time.”

The drummer for Gin Piston, bless his warmy, fuzzy soul, even gave me their original CD to send to The Mother, who has become a GP fan. The Mother will be delighted.

Indeed, the only people who gave any of the judges any perceptible level of grief was Danielle, my wife, and I, who viciously attacked Alicia on the ride home. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

Just like last week’s blog post, I don’t think it’s necessary to give you all a play-by-play account of each performance. I’ve already written about these bands before, and most of you were there last night anyway, so I thought I’d focus more on the scoring and, maybe at the end, talk a bit about some of the differences between each band, and also, whether each band improved on their first performance in the preliminaries.

Now, a lot of people approached me after the winners were announced and asked which band got which scores. I told them I would be happy to publish my scores on the blog, and if Danielle and Alicia gave permission, that I would publish their scores as well. And they agreed. So let’s take a look shall we?

I’ll start with the db readings. (To understand how crowd noise is applied to the judge’s score sheets please review the INTRODUCTION). The loudest crowd response was received by Detroit Underground (118.7dB), then Old School (117.5dB) followed by Anger is a Gift (115.8dB) and lastly Gin Piston (114.1dB).

Here are the scores and rankings per each judge.

Danielle LoPresti (Judge #1)

Anger is a Gift = 88

Old School = 88

Detroit Underground = 79.5

Gin Pistons = 62

Alicia Champion (Judge #2)

Detroit Underground = 87.5

Anger is a Gift = 86

Old School = 77.5

Gin Piston = 62

Ed Decker (Judge #3)

Anger is a Gift = 83 points

Old School = 82 points

Detroit Underground = 80.5

Gin Pistons = 72

As you can see, two of the judges did not have Detroit Underground advancing. Keep in mind though, these are the scores before crowd response was factored, so a quick tally of these numbers will tell us what the order would have been had crowd response not been factored.

Anger is a Gift (257)

Old School (247.5)

Detroit Underground (247)

Gin Piston (196)

So, basically, the main reason Detroit Underground is in the finals, and Old School is not, is because of crowd noise. Oh, and also because of Alicia’s dementia. You know, the dementia that caused her to rate Detroit Underground over Old School.

And boy did we give her a hard time about that. See Alicia, Danielle, my wife (who we’ll call “W”), and I often carpool to Viejas. As soon as we got into the car to go home, I turned to Alicia and said, “Girl, what is your major malfunction?” Why on Earth did you give DU a better score than Old School?” And with that, everybody in the car got up in Alicia’s grill:

Dani, who had Old School as a tie with Anger for the win, gave Alicia a whole ration of shit. And W., my wife, who damn near fell into a full state of depression upon hearing that Old School had lost, was just hammering poor Alicia with insults. Naturally, I was having my way with her as well.

It was quite fun, actually, and nice, for once, not to be the lone person getting jumped by everybody else in the car. To Alicia’s credit though, that girl stood her ground. She said (I’m paraphrasing) that Detroit Underground is a much stronger group of musicians, playing much more difficult material, and that was her opinion and she stands by it.

I said, “Alicia – it’s great that we have a diversity of opinions, and your opinions are always welcome in this car… Even when your opinions are so very wrong, wrong, WRONG.”

Please do not misunderstand; Detroit Underground is a great band. They took second place last year! And that wasn’t because the other bands sucked. Even when they’re not on the top of their game, they’re still a top shelf act. But Old School, well they surprised the hell out of me. Talk about stepping it up! When they played in the prelims, I thought they were good, but last night, they were effin great; just a sliver better than DU, but it’s all about slivers now, because we’re in the semi-finals. At this level, little things become big, important things, like a sliver of glass in your foot – such a tiny thing, can cause such disparity.

Such as the sliver that was DU’s suboptimal start. They were a little stiff at first, and sloppy, especially vocally; not at all up to par with their previous performance. And they seemed to be just going through the motions.

As Danielle said (paraphrased), “Even if you’ve played that song a hundred times, you have to find a way to make it sound like the first time.”

For me, that early part of the set, you could just tell they had played those songs a hundred times. Kudos to DU, however, for pulling it together in the second half, and for crushing it on the finale, and for winning the crowd noise game (another testament to their greatness), but for me, I think Old School was – I won’t say “the better band,” rather, that Old School had “the better night.”

So yeah, we gave Alicia a beat down for that. But, in the name of fairness, I thought it prudent to give Alicia the floor for a moment to explain her decision.

PLEASE don’t get me wrong – I LOVED Old School and personally wanted to take every single one of those boys home with me (and yes, I’m still a dyke). They had passion bursting at the seams, they looked gorgeous, their song selection KILLED, and I loved their original take on each song in their set. Were there intonation and tuning issues throughout their performance? Yes. Do I have to take that into account? Absolutely.

I thought lead singer Brian was wonderful, and yes, I would love to have him sing on something I’m producing. In fact, I’ve already started fantasizing about producing a big rock duet of some sort, JUST to feature both him and Danielle on a song together – that’s how much I loved his tone. I just feel that for about 50% of his set, he pushed so hard that it affected his pitch. He’s got a beautiful scream, when applied correctly. But when you scream so hard to the point you compromise pitch… well… that’s a problem.

Then we have tuning. Les Paul studio-models and capos. Ugh.

I don’t want to blame him for this because it really is the guitar…. but at the same time, if you’re rehearsing this exact set (for a competition of this grandeur, no less), you REALLY need to take this into account. “Ironic,” while truly fun in its third verse adaptation, was a tonal mess across the board. The lead guitar sounded a half-step (one fret) higher than the rhythm guitar, the lead vocals were matching neither, and this issue persisted thru to the next song. In fact, while the energy was great, the lead guitar solo in “You Give Love a Bad Name,” sounded so sharp (as in opposite of flat), it made me want to bury my head.

The background vocals were also hit or miss. 50% of the time they were spot on, 50% they weren’t, and sometimes…. they weren’t there at all because the lead guitarist/ background singer missed his cues.

They regrouped and took care of these problems before closing with Rush, and my god… did they finish with a bang. That closing performance was the first in this entire competition to bring me to my feet in applause.

Detroit Underground – I agree with both Ed and Danielle in thinking this performance was considerably weaker than that from their preliminary round. However, I still believed them to be the strongest act of the night, next to Anger Is a Gift. They did have some lead vocal issues, and the pocket was lost in the horn break of “Fire.” Regardless, the background vocals were spot on 100% of the time, and the musicians that make up the rhythm section of this ensemble are so talented, it’s humbling. This was the only band of the night with which I experienced constant improvisational flavors. The keyboardist, guitarist (and especially) the bassist, were throwing in all sorts of juicy, delicious line clichés and subtleties, it inspired me to go home and practice my chord scales. There’s no way I can mark down a band that brings me to that place. They are truly a musician’s group, and I related to that. As a producer/ arranger, these are aspects I’m trained to hear. I also know full well that details such as these always go unnoticed by the general listener, which is all the more reason I felt the need to acknowledge them.

I will say this though – If Detroit Underground plays a show like they did last night for Finals, I’m not confident they’ll have a shot at the prize. Even Alice and The Cooper Gang will give them a hard run for their money if they’re not 100% on their game.

Alicia Champion – Fill-in for Judge #1

Hey gang, Ed again. So, as you can clearly see, Alicia really should get tested for that dementia problem I mentioned earlier. Although she was right about the mortal danger DU is currently facing. They had better bring their A-game if they want to qualify for any cash. Because I’m starting to think Detroit Underground might be the Alex Rodriguez of music contests.

Like A-Rod, Detroit Underground always seems to play spectacularly in the regular season, but once they get into the playoffs they struggle.

As for Anger is a Gift, I don’t think there was any question in anyone’s mind (except the people who hate hardcore rock/rap) that Anger was going to advance to the finals. But, like DU, their set wasn’t as good as the prelim round either. But even Anger is a Gift’s B-game is several times better than most bands’ A-game. And when they vomited out “Killing in the Name of,” all the little slivers of error were forgotten, especially after hearing the shocking climax, with the singer howling, “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!” over and over like a banshee.

And not just any banshee, but a heavy metal banshee – a bänshee – who wears studded leather bracelets, black concert tee shirts, and who shakes his fists in the air like he’s trying to punch holes the ceiling so all the other a bänshees can get a look at what they’re missing.

Finally, Gin Pistons, chin up, ok? You guys were outgunned and that’s all there is to it. But I would check out a GP show any day of the week. Because you’re a ton of fun to watch and hear, you picked great songs, and you definitely stepped it up from last go-round. In fact, now that I think of it, it was the two losing bands who improved on their first performance, and the two winners who had deteriorated. So really, had any of these bands taken a half-step in either direction, we might be seeing a totally different finals lineup.

Anyway, that’s it for this week, except, to say, “Wow, are we here already? Are the finals really upon us? Well I, for one, simply cannot wait: Monsters of Rock, Anger is a Gift, Alice and the Cooper, Gang Detroit Underground – you are all class acts and it’s an honor and a privilege to be the sonovabitch who gets to decide your fate.

Muah-ha-ha-ha-ha.

General Edwin Decker
Judge #3
www.edwindecker.com

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This photo provided by John Marquez