2/10/03
The Cincinnati Enquirer
By Chris Varias
Emo acts draw sellout teen crowd
A couple of popular emo acts drew the sellout at Bogart's Friday night, while the son of rock royalty made it through the show as an anonymous front man of a barely known opening act.
Something Corporate and the Juliana Theory, the two groups at the top of the bill, captured the predominantly teen-age crowd's attention. Something Corporate did so with piano-showcasing rock in the style of Ben Folds Five. The Juliana Theory's approach was more straight-ahead and brought to mind words like "earnest" and "urgent" and "driving" and any other terms excitable rock critics use to describe emo.
Fiction Plane, the opener, boasted one of the biggest names in rock that nobody knows. The singer is Joe Sumner, and if that last name doesn't ring a bell, it's because dad Gordon Sumner goes by the nickname Sting.
A scheduled fourth band, Seattle's Vendetta Red, canceled its appearance for reasons undisclosed on the group's official Web site. The Web site also failed to report if any members of Vendetta Red were progeny of either Stewart Copeland or Andy Summers.
As for Sting's kid's band, Fiction Plane's performances ranked somewhere between that of the Juliana Theory and a High School Band Challenge champion.
Playing songs from a forthcoming MCA album titled Everything Will Never Be OK (Joe clearly inherited the old man's happy-go-lucky nature), Fiction Plane had its moments in rocking-out mode. However, there were only a couple of those. The group was more interested in self-important (now where would Joe learn to act like that?), hushed passages that amounted to wasted space.
The Juliana Theory was all about rocking, and the Pennsylvanian quintet put on the evening's best set.
They, too, worked the whisper-to-a-scream dynamics, but their keyboard-and-drum-machine atmospherics built to crashing climaxes, punctuated by the crowd jumping to the beat in step with the guitarists.
It's hard to say what the crowd heard in Something Corporate's music, built on lead singer Andrew McMahon's piano stylings. McMahon plays like Folds - more interested in gliding over the keys than banging away, and he sings cutesy and clever story songs also just like Folds.
