Contributed by:
YourHub.com
Article Contributed on: 12/4/2006 10:17:11 AM
The way I see it, there are two kinds of musicians in this world: those who are in command of their music, and those who are commanded by it.
The first type are solid, efficient music machines. They can crank out album after album with machinelike efficiency without letting quality suffer. They work hard, they tour regularly and they find spots on listeners' shelves.
The second type are endlessly uneven. They record infrequently, their songwriting swings in peaks and troughs and they take a good number of embarrassing risks. Their live shows lack polish and betray hints of vulnerability and doubt when the bill calls for unassailable rock gods. They constantly battle with their own music because it demands so much more of them than they can deliver.
Denver's
Apsis is the latter.That's what I love about them.
I caught the hard rock outfit at the Bluebird Theater on Nov. 25. Straight, unhyphenated, unadulterated hard rock seems like an unlikely thing to possess a musician - surely nobody thinks of the guys in
Nickelback agonizing over an arrangement - but the music was dictating the pace for anyone in the crowd sober enough to notice, and it wasn't about to have a word of protest from these four kids, these fourvessels, picked to carry its meandering, sludgy melodies.
Dramatic paeans to
Tool like "Turn into a Stranger" stood on their own merit, and no amount of head-banging would save derivative, tuneless mimics of the FM dial like "Counterpart II." Listen to some tracks on
their website and you'll come to the same conclusion: Apsis is a band flirting with ideas so much bigger than they are - the kinds of ideas that make a song that isn't just good, but a song that matters. They're the kind of ideas that demand risks,and the requisite failures now and then,to get the big payoff.
Learning to listen to those ideas and accommodate them will take time. But in the meantime, it's fun to hear a song like "Cleansing," a gorgeously textured, psychedelic instrumental jam, to get an idea of what things will sound like when Apsis and the muse are meeting on even terms.