Thursday, January 07, 2016

Band Review: Blinking Underdogs


The holidays are over, but I am once again reviewing a band that is not current, because it kind of fits with the Star Wars theme of the week. I read a reference about Oscar Isaac's former band, Blinking Underdogs, and then I liked what I heard, so I'm going for it.

Blinking Underdogs is a ska-punk band formed by students at the University of Miami School of Music. They released their first full-length album independently in 2001. There is also a note from 2001 on their archive page that Oscar has gone off to Julliard so they are taking a break, and Alan (Mills, trombone) has gone also, and it isn't really the same band without horns (it wouldn't be) so they are going to be a different band.

Before I get into the music, I want to say some things about that note. It sounds so familiar, remembering my college days and how every time you ran into some people their band name had changed because of member shifts. These things happen, but also the existence of an archive seems brilliant to me. There are so many bands that I wish I could go back and listen to again, where I am lucky if I happened to pick up the cassette tape back then, that finding that this music has been captured saved is a good thing.

I enjoyed the music overall. My favorite tracks were "Away", "Blue Alishia", and "Trailer Park". "Blue Alishia" may actually be the better song, but I am drawn to the class consciousness and loyalty of "Trailer Park".

Some of the tracks seem to lose strength by being too experimental. I love the intro on "Salvation", and it has some other elements that are really good but feel mismatched in their almost cacophonous blend. Still, these are music students, so some experimentation would be almost mandatory, and with the track that seems to be called "artist", while it sounds very different from the other songs it goes to interesting places. (Some tracks show a strong jazz influence.)

There are more links available that you would expect for a band that has not been together since 2001, though some of them seem hastily thrown up by Star Wars fans. The most useful sites were the archive and AllMusic.

Those are listed below, but I have also done some searches to try and find out the whereabouts of other band members. I got the idea after seeing an interview where Isaac said that the bass player, Nick (Speck, also the one who write the note on the archive) plays for Orgy now. Checking them out, that is a pretty good band, and I may want to do a full review of them later. (With some names you need to be careful on your search parameters.) Anyway, this is what I could find. I hope I got the right people.

Oscar Isaac (vocals, guitar)
Okay, we kind of know what he is doing now, but there is a fan page with a section on music and you could start there, or maybe watch Inside Llewyn Davis:


Nick Speck (bass)
Apparently Orgy isn't his only other band. I will probably get back to him.


Bill Sommer (drums)
Apparently also an author now.


Alan Mills (trombone)
All I could find was that he was also in a band called The Know How, but that came before Blinking Underdogs.

Keith Cooper (sax)
There is a nice bio here with his endorsement of a reed.


Matt LaPlant (guitar)
It looks like he might be doing sound mixing now. Some similar names made finding information on him more difficult.


And here are the Blinking Underdog links:




No comments: