Sean, Singers Ruin Perfectly Good Bands

Sean’s an instrumental duo made up of a keyboardist and a drummer — the keyboardist plays through a guitar amplifier and effects, getting a sound that’s closer to a guitar, or at least not always like a keyboard. They get a decent range of sounds out of the keyboards, and the sounds’re definitely different from the normal guitar effect sounds. They play short, highly complex, prog-ish compositions (mostly 1-2 minutes) at ear-splitting volumes.

All of the songs here are well executed — both the guys in the band are extremely technically gifted. The problem is that there isn’t a lot of variety to the songs; both instruments do pretty much the same thing at all times. While some of the keyboard and drum parts are interesting, they don’t particularly stand out from the others. And when you’re dealing with music that is consistently loud (something they’re clearly doing intentionally), you need to vary it in some other way. So, if you don’t want to change the volume, you’ve got to do something to break things up (unless what you’re doing is really inspired, that is [which, no, this isn’t]). Sean would be a fun band to see live, I’m sure, but what makes a good performance versus a good record are often two different things.