I had a bit of time to check Avid Dancer before Nick Waterhouse, it’s always hard to decide during a festival, and some of the stages at Make Music Pasadena were so far apart that I missed a few acts I wanted to check out. I had seen Avid Dancer before, during some of these numerous festivals at the Echo/Echoplex and strangely I had in mind a much more muscular music… may be I was remembering more the physique of the band members than the music itself because it was poppier than I thought, with some really strong and catchy melodies. But it’s understandable since frontman Jacob Summers is an ex-marine with ‘blood’ written on his guitar, and his dark-long-hair bassist, had an animal and fascinating presence.
They got heavier at times, had surfing and breezy ballads, with mostly dreamy vocals but their male harmonies had a vague the-Kinks-meets-Queens-of-The-Stone-Age vibe at times, if this makes any sense, something I did not really hear again when I listened to them again on the web, Go figure! Yeah, they were really hard to pigeonhole, and they get all sort of comparisons, but they probably don’t want to be pigeonhole as Summers is famous for saying he draws his influences from all over the place, and quite unintentionally, since he was raised in a strict Christian household and was forbidden to listen to any secular music until his late teens! Thus, he grew up totally ignorant of many of our collective musical memory, and admits to still find himself in a constant state of musical discovery,… extraordinary, it didn’t take him too long to catch up with what he had missed!
Avid Dancer accidently sounded like many other bands, and no other bands, they had a cool energy on stage, some sweet psych-pop going into full rock effect and as they seemed to brilliantly achieve this delicate balance between quiet and loud, I should not forgot to mention the dance element in Avid Dancer.
