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Medicine Circus
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Bottle Rockets Of Emotion
Self-Released
Release: 4/26/2005
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Rated:
Review by:
Jason Warner
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Medicine Circus is a band I heard of several years ago. I've
seen their flyers posted here and there around town, so I
know they've been playing shows consistently, but they are
one of the Salt Lake City bands that I have never seen live,
and had never even heard their music prior to receiving
their latest album, Bottle Rockets Of Emotion.
Sometimes it amazes me that there can be all these bands
out there playing shows constantly and being around for
year after year and yet I have never heard them. I guess I
figure that if a band is really that great then there will be a
buzz, people will be talking about them, the news will get
around. Then there are the bands that keep playing music
for years that no one ever hears about because they get
stuck playing Tuesday night gigs in sparsely attended bars.
Some of these bands deserve to be hugely popular; some
deserve to fade away into obscurity. When we got Medicine
Circus's new album I decided it was about time I took a
listen to them for myself.
Medicine Circus has been playing around the area for at
least four years now. I've never heard them, and I've never
heard anyone talking about them. This is unjust. I think
any band that plays for this long should have people either
loving them or hating them. From taking one listen to their
self released album, Bottle Rockets Of Emotion,
it is obvious they believe in what they are doing. Now the
challenge is to get other people to buy into that same belief.
The musical skill is present and accounted for. The guitars
are screaming, raging, the bass thumping, the drums
pounding, the singer wailing. But somewhere along the way
something went wrong. The band is obviously more than a
little bit influenced by 90s alternative rock, but I wouldn't
lump them in with the grunge label because their music is
too clean and safe. There are obvious late 60s early 70s
influences here, ala The Beatles all the way to Led Zeppelin,
but the pop hooks are not there. What it seems to me is
that Medicine Circus put all these great influences in a
blender and came out with something unrecognizable and
confusing. Imagine putting every ingredient in your kitchen
into a cake...the cake would come out tasting complex, but
not necessarily good. The same is true for Medicine Circus.
It is easy to pick out good elements of their music. The lead
guitar player is obviously skilled, but it seems like there is a
guitar solo going on through pretty much the whole album.
The songwriting is unconventional. There are no solid
melodies, which make the songs memorable, although there
are good riffs throughout the album.
For me the major downfall of Bottle Rockets Of
Emotion is the singing. The vocals are constantly
drowned in reverb, creating a sort of slurred together effect
that makes the lyrics indecipherable. I imagine they were
trying to express a dreamy swirling feeling… but instead it
comes across as a bland flavorless mush that goes on
throughout the 43 minutes and 10 tracks of the album. It
doesn't seem like the singer is ever content to hold a note
for longer than one second, but rather wants to do some
voice wavering business akin to Layne Staley's singing every
couple of seconds. There were times when the vocals
reminded me of a cross between Incubus and Stone Temple
Pilots. The vocals made this album unlistenable for me. I
tried several times to listen to the whole album in one sitting,
but I couldn't make it.
Sometimes there are bands that don't get the attention they
deserve. Sometimes there are bands that work just as hard
as any of the rich rock stars on MTV but in the end they just
don't have what it takes to make it. Sometimes the music
just really isn't that good. |
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