Published on Jan 13, 1999
What’s the worst thing that happens when a certain form of music
becomes instantly the craze? You end up with oversaturation of the
genre, and its eventual death.
It happened in the late ’80s with heavy metal, and it is
happening right now with the alternative rock scene. One such band
who happened in on the then-flowering alternative scene was Dig, a
band I’ll freely admit I never particularly cared for. I have no
doubts that they were sincere about the music they were creating,
but they just sounded like another cookie-cutter band. (For
example, what band doesn’t sound like Matchbox 20 these days?)
Not even the almost complete re-building of the band (save for
founding member/vocalist/guitarist Scott Hackwith) help matters
much, although the band’s third album
Life Like deoes have a richer texture to it, much like The
Beatles in their later days or The Verve today. The music isn’t
bad, but it’s just not exciting.
From the opening moments of “Live In Sound,” the listener is hit
with wave after wave of rich audio levels courtesy of Hackwith,
guitarist John Morris, bassist Jay Nicholas and drummer Gene
Trautmann. But the problem isn’t with the tonality of the music or
the overall performances. Simply put, the songwriting doesn’t allow
any one performance to really stand out. It’s easy to put this disc
on, look away for what you think are a few minutes, then look back
to discover over half the disc has played. (The disc itself is a
short 39-plus minutes for 12 songs.) “Coming Down” flows almost too
smoothly into “The Fuzz,” and so on.
This isn’t to say that all the songs blend into one gelatinous
mess. Tracks like “All Over You,” “I Don’t Mind” and the title
track do stand out after repeated listenings as being somewhat
superior to the other offerings. (And at such a short running time,
this is a disc that you can easily slap on for more than one
listen.)
But Dig doesn’t seem to have any one characteristic that sets
itself from the Third Eye-Hootie-Matchbox scenario that seems to
have gripped the alternative rock world in the last few years. They
seem perfectly happy playing as the background music to the scene –
and that is where I think they’re making their biggest mistake. Dig
does have more potential than I would have given them credit for
prior to multiple listens of
Life Like – but they don’t act on it.
In a musical genre where bands act as lemmings, following their
musical predecessors over the cliffs, Dig does nothing to break
away from the free-fall that alternative rock seems to be in. That
is the greatest disappointment with
Life Like.