Dinosaur Bones has way way too much sound going on for such a tiny venue. Back rooms at bars should be reserved exclusively for lounge music.
The back room of Pianos in the Lower East Side is a pretty lousy venue. The five man group from Toronto aren’t a lounge band. Packing that big a sound into that small a room, I went damn near deaf about, say, two songs into their set on Saturday night.
They played a bunch of songs of their album “My Divider” and they are one of those bands that sounds basically the same live as they do on the album—that is, besides a few brief high-pitch guitar solos, which, because of the nature of the venue, were unbearably painful.
Sounding similar to the album can be a good thing for a band if the album is good, which “My Divider” is. It’s got an infectious British pop-rock sound and the lead vocalist sounds similar to Brit Daniels of Spoon. But it’s got too much variety throughout for the album to really be pinned down as a simple genre record. If you ever get the chance to hear them play live, go—but only if the venue is larger than a storage closet.
The video for Dinosaur Bones’ “Ice Hotels”:
