Review Summary: Your standard acoustic half-set. Only one song here doesn't really work all stripped down, but both singers aren't great at keeping their composure live even with the minimalism of acoustic guitars. Still, it gets the job done.
Sophistication and colour in music is important, but so are the fundamentals of good songwriting. Which is more important? That is the question that tends to drive a lot of covers, remixes and especially acoustic versions later performed by the same artist. Peter Gabriel famously turned a neat album track from his first solo record into one of his defining moments as a solo artist when Here Comes The Flood was turned into a stripped down piano number. Unplugged concerts by Nirvana and Alice In Chains immediately redefined much of their discography. On the other hand, there are acoustic performances that undermine what makes a band or song special. If the Silversun Pickups are about their intersection of shoegaze and lo-fi indie rock, two very noisy and effects driven genres, who would want to hear a version of Well Thought Out Twinkles or Panic Switch without the full sound suite? It'd sound totally ridiculous!
And that's the barometer by which I measure any acoustic version of an originally electric song, and certainly how I'd analyse a whole setlist of them, whose presence as an "album" in the band's discography would otherwise seem totally superfluous and unnecessary to any sort of grander statement by the band. In this concert at Florida's Plaza, Megaphone stripped down to just two men, singer Matt Bloodwell and guitarist Paul Smith, with one acoustic guitar apiece, and a six song setlist split two-to-four between their first two albums. Conceptually, it's about the best you can hope for, though in my personal opinion it's not quite their best selection of songs.
Still, an acoustic arrangement of an electric song is usually novel if nothing else, even if oversupply has come close to ruining that factor, and as I have made clear, the X-factor of Megaphone's songwriting seems like it would work just fine with original acoustic pieces, so these new arrangements aren't that far off either. My Favorite New Disaster and We Were Young are easily the best, however, easing the feelings of the songs back and letting the excellent melody work stand on its own. The solo arrangements are just close enough to the originals while adding a bit of tangy acoustic flair to stand on their own.
Gravitate doesn't work too bad either, despite the original feeling much faster. The little dips in the chorus translate perfectly fine, but it's certainly no substitute for the original. Drama Queen also works surprisingly well in general, but it and Bad To Good demonstrate how the lack of three part harmonies definitely suck a lot of power out of the arrangement. Any time the higher harmony is left to just hang there, it feels a little bit awkward, and the originals had that extra addition to the body of the mix for a reason. It also exposes the lyrical flaws of each track; that Carly Simon shout-out in Drama Queen still irks me.
The set then closes with Not Your Enemy, which is slowed down a fair bit from the original fast-paced rocker that tries its hardest to keep up. It's their shakiest performance by far. It's the only one where a couple of chord changes are made late, but sadly, just about every track features a few bum notes on the vocals by both men. Any time a harmony isn't just right, it feels so wrong. No pressure in a live setting, right? Matt's performance is serviceable and certainly powerful, but it's another dent in the armor of the argument against studio polish and re-takes. Bad performances are ephemeral, but bad song recordings are around forever.
It feels weird to call myself a fan of a band with only three albums and very, very little activity in a career that spans over a decade, but if I didn't like the breadth of their work as much, I wouldn't have bothered with a cheapo acoustic EP. And I got pretty much what I expected out of it. Outside of swapping Bad To Good for a song like The Sin, it was as good as I was expecting it to be. So, nothing spectacular, but a decent enough inversion on what should be well-worn compositions.
