WindyCityStrugglers ... Gigs ... July 31, 2008
REVIEW - The Windy City Strugglers
CD Release concert - SHINE ON
Montecristo Room
An extraordinary near perfect performance from New Zealand's oldest and longest running band. The Windy City Strugglers may be an ancient Wellington band, but Auckland sure came out in droves filling the Montecristo Room. Always good to see a band with a full house with an audience there to listen. They performed masterpieces with panache.
In this their 40th year - a new CD with a fresh set of blues songs Shine On reminded you just how good the Strugglers are these days. Each Stugglers record seems better than ever, but their back catalogue was represented with a few songs, an appropriately wild weathered Snow on the Desert Road.
The new songs certainly did shine, Lucky Man (Bryant/Lake) was full of energy, Taxi Driver (Lake/Baysting) and Bluer Than You'll Ever Be (Bryant/Spittle) - contrasting classics from both ends of the blues, found the formidable top shelf vocal talents of Bryant and Lake. The Old Gods (Bryant/Lake) - Lake's guitar string clarity and Bryant's extraordinary vocal control - listen to it on the CD. It seems to come from the very roots of this band.
The impeccable Ross Burge on drums and the remarkable Steve Jessup on slide guitar and guitar, Andrew Delahunty's magic with a mouth organ and guitar, Alan Norman on keyboards and harmonica. So perfect you won't ignore the notes that flowed from the agile fingers of Nick Bollinger.
The room itself was very comfortable, and worked well, the sound was succinctly managed by Tony McMaster, perhaps its a case of you know when only the best will do, there is a certain level of quiet accuracy and experience to fill a room with sound properly.
The only problem, and it was not minor, was lighting. A perpetual karaoke hell of cycling washes (that not only played havoc with the camera, but) made one feel disjointed. Automatic mindlessly sequenced cycles of bright flat colour did not suit the band. Just occasionally it coincidentally struck a deep blue at the right moment.
Most of the time it just seemed quite wrong. The beauty of manually driven live lights with a skilled lighting engineer would have preserved the character and dignity that the band established and won so well in every other respect, consequently it did not matter that much the lighting was pretty but inarticulate - because the music and performance of it overshadowed it.