I popped into The Social last night for the Randall Shreve CD Release Party. Only caught Benjamin Del Shreve though. Decent band but shaky singing. Beyond imperfection of pitch, Ben's ambitious but very ungainly voice seems oddly prone to cat mewing.
My biggest beef, however, was the gratuitous plugging of Randall Shreve's CD. When I say gratuitous, I literally mean almost every non-singing sentence urged the audience to purchase. Though couched in humor that was occasionally funny, the schtick got old real fast. It may be cute to immediate family and friends but everyone else thinks it's stupid and annoying. After that, I forcibly squashed any passing thoughts of buying the record as a form of silent protest. I didn't care if it was Psychocandy good, I just wasn't havin' any of it. Sorry, Randall. You need to have a talk with your boy.
Hey man,
just ran across you trying to find something else. Apparently you did the same thing the night of my release party. Just wanted to say that I'm glad you didn't stick around for my show. Because if you didn't like Benjamin, you sure as hell wouldn't like me and I figure I would probably be feeling pretty shabby about myself right now reading a bad review of the show. haha.
Anyhow, I wanted to reply to your comment where you said that "It may be cute to immediate family and friends but everyone else thinks it's stupid and annoying". I know that you couldn't have known this, but you were the "everyone else" that night. Everyone else was either family or friends. You weren't really invited...no offense. Everyone else thought it was funny and bought the CD, but I can understand why you didn't find it funny. I'll be back here to check out more reviews. Seems like a cool spot.
-Randall
Posted by: Randall Shreve | June 08, 2006 at 12:00 AM