Friday I wrote the Fallfest article. This did not allow me to let my music critic side show.
This Fallfest was one of the biggest disappointments of my extended UB career. The Student Association wasted hundreds of thousands of our dollars on a show that interested no one.
First the crowd at Fallfest was dismal. The audience could have fit into the Town Ballroom, which holds a thousand people. The crowd barely took up a quarter of the arena floor, and people were sporadically filling in the seats in the back.
The point of Fallfest is to give UB students a concert that can get the campus excited. A good portion of the crowd were students, but not UB students. Most of the crowd seemed to be high schoolers or older couples.
It makes my skin crawl that SA held a concert where the majority of the concertgoers weren't even UB students. SA spent a pretty penny putting this event together, and the people that paid for it had a minimal desire to go.
The acts were almost as laughable as the crowd. Two out of the three bands were a joke and a complete waste of money.
2 AM Club is the biggest joke of a band I have seen since I saw Metro Station four years ago. Its instrumentation is more simplistic than most pop music and the band's sound is unoriginal.
2 AM Club sounds like Maroon 5 with a dreadful white rapper. Both singers of the band seemed more interested in securing a lady of the evening than performing their music. They even took a break from their set so one could jump down and give a girl his number…and it only cost students like 500 dollars to watch him do that.
The White Panda is also a joke. Most mash-up artists are boring to watch for the simple fact that they just hide behind their computer. At least DJs make their own music, which is more than can be said for The White Panda.
The "band" stood behind a screen pretty much invisible to the pit. The only time the band seemed to be visible was when one of the members popped his head out to sing the lyrics to a song he didn't write.
I understand mash-up artists have minimal creativity, but the good ones take risks in their mash-ups. The White Panda just took two songs that sound similar and already really popular and combined them. Other artists try and mash-up songs that one would not expected to be mixed together.
Girl Talk is a perfect example. He uses two random songs and still makes them sound good, like "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath and "Move Bitch" by Ludacris.
I have a Mac as well – if I download Ableton, can SA pay me thousands of dollars to mix songs that people already love?
The tackiest thing of all is that they were playing 2 AM Club and The Fray in between sets. We are already here to listen to these bands perform these songs, we don't we really need to hear it 15 minutes after they already played it.
The Fray were surprisingly good live. While the band's stage show was boring – only the singer seemed to get into it – the band sounded great. The only problem I have with The Fray is why are they HEADLINING a fest.
I would have had no reservations if The Fray were one of the opening acts, but its target audience is not college students. The Fray almost put me to sleep with its performance because there was nothing exciting.
SA put on one of the worst Fests of all time with Fallfest 2011. Here's hoping it does better for Springfest (I know, I'm laughing as I write this).
Email: jameson.butler@ubspectrum.com
