After I

finished up at the ES Jungle and Piradical Producion’s alternative dance party Punk Rock Prom, I headed down to Broadripple proper to head to the main show (at least in my book) of the evening, Bad Manners at the Vogue, with local ska/soul fusion band the Green Room Rockers. Also, Tax Brandywine, but we’ll get into that later.

Before heading to the club I met up with one of my friends and got something to eat beforehand. I anticipated dancing in abundance, and wanted to make sure I had a proper degree of energy and a little something in my stomach to help cut down on the effects of the inevitable drinking. It wasn’t long before we found our way to The Vogue, waiting patiently for the show to start.

I haven’t been to The Vogue much, and as a venue, I like it. The acoustics are good, there’s enough seating to go around for those who want to sit, a reasonable availability of your drink of choice and a pretty solid dance floor. In all honesty, I’m a basement and house party kind of person, having come up in Indiana’s half-assed all ages venues, so I find anywhere with dedicated stage lights markedly impressive.

On to the music, and the show as it was presented to us. Tax Brandywine, a Tenn. based three man, self described ska, rock, reggae, folk, pop and punk act (really, their website claims to be all of those), took the stage first. I’m going to be upfront with this before I start my diatribe; I hated Tax Brandywine, with a passion usually reserved for idiotic drivers, trash pop music and reality television. After several songs, I literally just tuned out, nursing my beer, waiting for them to stop. Graciously, they didn’t play long enough for me to drink myself into oblivion. As I look back at my notes from this portion of the show, they’re literally just a list of jokes that my companion and I were continually cracking as the set dragged on. A few choice selections?

“They just said their new album is called Atrocities on the Highway, which strikes me as shockingly appropriate.”

“The mixing seems a little off, the vocals are too loud,” I said to my friend.

His reply? “Maybe the audio engineer is trying to find a way to make them suck less. It’s not working.”

Joking assigned, they really were miserable. Their songs meandered on, their lead singer’s voice is gratingly pitched and occasionally the drummer seemed to wander off, getting distracted and playing what seemed to be a completely different tempo than his other band mates, as if someone forgot to speed up or slow down where appropriate.

Moreover, I don’t mean to be a snob about the whole ska/reggae identification, but I really don’t feel like you can have a ska/reggae/rocksteady band with only three people. Just playing mostly on the downbeat does not a reggae act make.

And while I like a band that’s innovative, that doesn’t let themselves be pigeon holed into one particular sound, Tax Brandywine is all over the map of mediocrity. They’re “ska” songs are boring, they’re pop songs are boring and their rock songs are boring. It didn’t seem that I was the only person in the crowd who thought so; only five or six people remained standing throughout their set. If you’re ever on stage performing, it’s a pretty good indicator that if there’s a dance floor and everyone is sitting down, things aren’t going well.

But things got better! Tax Brandywine was almost a rite of passage as sorts to be permitted to get to the rest of the show and I honestly envy those who got to the show late enough to only see the other two acts. The Green Room Rockers, fresh off their European tour, were next up.  I’m probably a little biased here. The Green Room Rockers are almost certainly my favorite local band since The Naptones broke up years ago.  They’ve adopted the ska/soul blend pioneered by the likes of Westbound Train and the Slackers and taken the style to places that neither of those bands have been. The Green Room Rockers are going places, don’t doubt that, and I can definitely see them being the next big thing in ska, in Indiana and the rest of the country, if not the whole world.

The first time I saw the Green Room Rockers was at what used to be known as the Halloween House, in fact at the night it earned that name. The venue was terrible. It was a tiny basement space with a low ceiling, terrible lighting and worse acoustics, but I remember standing in that crowd, dressed as the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (it was Halloween, alright?), absolutely enraptured by the energy and enthusiasm of the Green Room Rockers. After that, I made every effort to see them.

And they didn’t disappoint in their first appearance at the Vogue. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them, and they’ve only gotten better. The last few times I’ve seen them, they were playing primarily from their debut album, Hoosier Homegrown, but now they’ve recorded quite a bit more and are performing new songs. They’ve gone in a slower, more soulful direction, but it’s really not a bad thing. I honestly can’t recommend this band any more highly.