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To sum up this evening at Martyrs in one word, it would be the word bittersweet. Sweet, because Tim Booth gave an excellent (if short) performance. He opened with the song Laid, and then followed it up later with the song Sometimes – both of which are among my favorites. The bitter part of the evening was the performance by the main act – Low Millions.

How to best describe the music and performance of Low Millions? Once, maybe twice in your life you come across artists of their caliber. Performers of such perfected mediocrity that it’s actually quite stunning at first to be in their presence. At first you think "wow, they’re really cheesing it up – they must be being snarky and ironic". But they’re not. This is genuine.

So what does it mean when your most genuine and earnest effort is simultaneously fake, trite and unoriginal in every conceivable way? It’s just a taste of how cruel the universe can be really.

Some bands just suck, but in their sucking they carve out something that’s uniquely their own. They start to suck in a way that no one else has sucked before, and for a moment they come full circle and start to be good again.

But that’s not the fate of Low Millions. They are good and suck in the exact same way that every other forgettable band has been good and sucked. They’re interesting only as a scientific anomaly: a band that for a shining moment summed up the exact, white hot focal point of mediocrity. They nailed it, and nailed it with laser-like accuracy and military precision. And for that one thing they were exemplary. But sadly, mediocrity is the one of those things where the reward for excellence is to be briefly mocked and then forgotten.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 9th, 2005 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Concerts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.