Rogue Wave is a wildly mediocre band from Oakland, Calif. The band purveyed its wares to a large crowd Wednesday night at the 9:30 club, one show in a long list of many this summer, including stops at monster festivals like Bonnaroo. But the show prompted some in the audience (read: this writer) to question the need for such mediocre music makers.
Somehow, whatever entity controls the fate of fledgling bands, who decides what bands should embark on national tours and which should play to throngs of whiskey and Coke-swilling dudes and dudettes, has smiled on bands like Rogue Wave in the past few years. Dr. Dog, Head of Femur, Bellman Barker, if you want to get local-they're all the same. They're not bad, they're just "OK" to a disappointing level. It's a sad story, but all too familiar.
Lead singer and guitarist Zach Schwarz -who, cleverly enough, goes by the name Zach Rogue-formed the band in 2003. It sounds like he wrote one vaguely catchy song sometime between then and now, made sure to allow for an extended rock-out outro for the live show, then continued to write that same song over and over again. Every song of the hour-plus set satisfied the same alternative/pop rock tropes, with few exceptions.
Multi-instrumentalist/utility man Pat Spurgeon, who, if you took away the dumb Castro hat and the soul patch and shaved his prematurely graying hair, would look like a namby-pamby Ian MacKaye, cranked out the unimaginative lead guitar licks most of the night. Gram Lebron held down the stage right spot, switching between a guitar synthesizer. Patrick Abernathy, former keyboard player for Beulah, another band known for its brand of sometimes boring pop, played bass.
To Rogue Wave's credit, they did manage to maintain a jovial mood in the club, which was, by the frontman's own admission, much bigger than most of the venues on their tour. They really would have been more at home in a smaller club, but Schwarz managed to keep a rapport with the crowd, fielding requests and joking around.
But the show called into question what it really means "to rock." Rogue Wave may be called a rock band, but they do no "rock." They tried really hard, which is not necessarily bad, but there are simply inherent flaws in their music. These flaws are not in execution or the band's belief in what it's doing-the music is just nondescript and vague, not notable or memorable in any way.
Even when the band opened the song "Lake Michigan," off last year's full-length "Asleep at Heaven's Gate," with the ol' everyone-in-the-band-plays-drums trick, the reaction wasn't the intended, "whoa, this is intense!" It was instead the same feeling of "eh" that permeated the rest of the show.
The problem is that band isn't bad. The band members are all able musicians, and Schwarz has a fine voice. That's what makes it frustrating, and what warrants writing about the band at all-if Rogue Wave were bad, we could ignore them; if they were good, we could celebrate them. But they were none of the above, just adding to the clutter of touring vans littering America's highways, mediocre bands on the run. Save the planet, guys. Stay at home.
