Concert Review: Greyhound Bandits at La Casa

For some people Valentine’s Day is about candy, hearts,
chocolate, and love. For others it can be about pints of ice cream and sitting
at home missing something they used to have, or never had at all. Or I guess it
could come down to a combination of the two options.

My choice this year was Mexican food and music. City has
already told you about the food offerings at La
Casa (93 Alexander St.), but the South Wedge Mexican restaurant has started
to add live music to the mix as well. For Friday night’s Valentine’s Day
festivities the restaurant brought in self-described street-folk group The
Greyhound Bandits.

After opting for a little more room than what was allowed by
the initial doorway staging area, the trio (two electric guitars, one acoustic)
decided to set up and sit down in a tight booth on the lower floor of the
restaurant. The unconventional placement meant that the music was a bit hard to
hear over the dining-room murmur, and it was even harder to tell exactly when
and where the songs began and the jamming ended.

What resulted was players that looked lost, but not lost in
the music. It was as if each musician was having a personal jam session in his
head, instead of sharing one as a trio. The music as a whole seemed based more
in the improvisational world than anything folk. One guitarist would solo while
the other two pattered between chords, not really centering around
an apparent theme or any solid idea as a base. I couldn’t tell if these were
actually pre-planned songs (one, with vocals, I’m guessing must have been) or
just repeated chord changes and heads being soloed over until somebody in the
group decided it was time for things to end, and for something else to start. Even
with just three people, the group didn’t seem to be on the same page musically,
and the pieces didn’t mesh together.

A restaurant gig is obviously going to have different
expectations placed on it than on one performed on a stage, in a more
traditional venue. And the atmosphere at La Casa was more geared toward
background dinner music than anything else. But I don’t think this band has yet
found its niche, at least not based on what I saw Friday night.

This article appears in Feb 12-18, 2014.