Stanford Show

[skywhopper]

This review is from watching the Stanford show on Fan Network. I wasn't able to pay close attention during Open Class, so my apologies for not covering those corps. I focus on brass and visual because I'm totally unqualified to judge percussion and guard:

Mandarins

Came out sounding great. Overall a very impressive sound. Nothing spectacular in the visual design, but the executed what they had pretty well. The music was great through the entire piece, and if they feel they must use narration, this was a good choice--a real immigrant story with some darkness to it, split into very small chunks that introduce sections of the music. I found the story to be very effective--unlike, say, Cadets 2008 where the story was completely made up and filled with artificial melodrama. Whether this story is true or fictional, it contains truth and is relevant to the corps itself, to the history of the United States, and to the current political discussion. So Kudos to Mandarins! Keep up the hard work!

Pacific Crest

Ever improving Pacific Crest! Very exciting to seem them with a strong performance this early. At first read this isn't as unified of a show as the past two or three years, but the corps sounds great, and I think they are constantly pushing themselves to achieve more visually. There was more noticeable visual dirt than with Mandarins, but they were more ambitious as well. Someone mentioned that the visuals didn't match up to the intensity of the music in some spots and while the opener was pretty good on that, there were spots in the middle where they were definitely underplaying the visuals. They could totally throw in some extra moves to make up for that, I think, and so perhaps they will as the season continues. I don't think this show will propel them to finals, but I think they are definitely standing strong in the top 15 or so.

Blue Knights

Wow! Very impressive program, both visually and musically. This years and last are definitely a step above their older shows in terms of holding my interest throughout the entire show. I see some hints of last year's aggressive visual style, but dialed back just a bit from where I think last year they took things a little too far. I seriously loved their take on First Circle, which is not something I was able to say about the last couple of times that piece hit the field. But can I say I wish they'd had a real steel drum setup instead of using the synth?

As for the narration, the first line of the narration would have made a good opening statement, but the rest I didn't enjoy. Either it was impossible to make out or it drowned out the music. I'm also confused by the singing in the sampled voice, as to my understanding that's against the rules. Anyway, without the voiceover in the opener, I'd be all over this show. As it is, I really enjoy all the parts after the voiceover is complete.

Carolina Crown

Fantastic show from Crown. The high camera really, really improves the experience of this show over the too-low YouTube videos we've seen. The drill this year is probably the best flowing drill we've ever seen from them. A few scatter sets, but mostly it's all one consistent idea flowing through the show, whereas in past years you could see cut and pastes from other shows, or to add a segment, or massive jumps from one idea to the next. And besides a few obvious mistakes, the drill seemed very clean. Obviously nowhere near as nuts as last year's. Obviously the brass is incredible. The triplet run at the end of the percussion feature is pretty amazing. I'm going to guess the rippling through the brass is more impressive live. On mike, it sounds a little sloppy still, but I'm guessing playing it tutti would be even worse at that speed. Still, the entire percussion feature along with the brass tag is the best part of the show. I think they've adjusted the ballad a little to minimize crosstalk between the brass and the narrator, which is for the best. I don't think that narration will be going away. In the preshow did I hear actual human counting along with the sampled counting or was that just my ears deceiving me? I think they could get away with the entire corps or the battery or something doing that chant in the opener, given how quiet everything else is, and I think it would sound better than the autotuned robot-sounding samples. I think the closer doesn't really fit the minor-key tone of the rest of the show, but I'm holding out hope that when they finish the drill it'll blow me away.

Overall, though, fantastic show and clearly the audience was eating it up throughout.

Santa Clara Vanguard

Wowee! Thank you SCV for putting on a truly "traditional" show with familiar music. I was a little disappointed with Boston's take on Les Mis last year since they felt the need to mix in 1812. And SCV's Planets last year was reharmonized and chopped up to the point that I couldn't really get into it. But this is a fantastic take on the material. I love that they played it in pretty much show-order. The mello soloist on Bring Him Home was fantastic, but I can't help comparing it to Boston's bari soloist from last year.

Anyway, drill was pretty old school (read: late-80s/90s) but I'm cool with that. But still they seemed to use a lot less of the field than Crown did. They were dirtier than Crown on the marching, but there are some really effective moments when the sets just sprang up at a big brass hit. Musically, they were taking pretty much everything too fast, IMO, and some of the music suffered for it, but that might be something that will sound better as they tighten things up. This was the first corps in which I clearly heard some Thunderous Goo^tm (ie, synth ultra-bass notes) but just for a second or two. The synth strings did bug me during the mello solo with the brass at extreme backfield. I had ugly flashbacks of Phantom 2011 where the synth totally covered up the most beautiful mello soli (during Requiem). This was not as bad, and didn't last as long, but still... I don't understand why it needed to be there.

Overall, fantastic show, and I'm thrilled there will be at least one show that I can unequivocally promise my wife she will enjoy when we see them live.

Blue Devils

Hmm. First, I'll say that I really enjoyed the musical arrangement for the brass. The swinging sections were out of this world, exactly the kind of thing I want to hear at least a few times during an evening of drum corps. That really-big band sound is one of the things drum corps can do better than anything else in the world. They also sound great on all the rough Stravinsky chords. All the stuff that Academy tried to do and just wasn't quite pulling off last year, Blue Devils (unsurprisingly) nailed those harmonies in June. Those sections are going to sound grrrreat come August. Can't wait for that.

Musically, my big complaint is the huge amount of reliance they are placing on synth and other effects. The ultra-reverb effect on the trumpet solos sound decent, and do make me feel like I'm listening to a jazz record from the 70s, but they go back to that time and again. In contrast to all the rest of the corps in this show, I heard a LOT of Thunderous Goo^tm early in the show. Later I was disappointed with their use of the synth to put in an electric guitar part and then later a significant bass guitar part. Hey guys, those instruments are legal, and it would sound better to use the real thing. The trap set breaks, I could do without. That sound just doesn't match up with the battery, and it's jarring to go back and forth. The piano sound they used at the intro and later on, I guess it was supposed to be an electric piano, but it wasn't as good as past piano patches they've used, so that felt a little awkward, and again, there was just too much of it. My biggest complaint about all the electronic action, though, is that while BD does a really good job with the sounds that are coming out of their speakers, when it's up against the entire brass section, or when it switches back and forth, there's so much reverb that's missing (or of a different quality) in the brass, that it ends up sounding flat and quiet compared to the lush, professionally designed soundscapes coming out of the PAs. Maybe this is not something everyone experiences in the same way, but even live this kind of thing can ruin a show for me--that happened to me with the Cavies last year. In the closer, the electronics so overpowered everything else and had such a different environmental quality that the brass sounded flat, dull, and uninteresting. All that said, however, Blue Devils have integrated electronics and brass into a coherent sound better than most anyone else out there, and they did a phenomenal job with that last year, so I am willing to blame mike placement, etc, and assume that the live experience by the end of the season will be good on this score.

Finally, visually, the poles/sticks feel really noisy, and in the end don't get used nearly as interestingly as I think they might have been. As for the drill, there were a couple of interesting moments, like when the block is marching across the field and subgroups are pulling off without the original block ever seeming to contract. But my main complaint is the lack of strong visual hits. Someone else in this thread used the term "written visual dirt" which is a great way to capture it. It's a problem I had with last year's show as well. Multiple sets at important moments in the show are essentially random. Even if they *are* hitting specific dots (and I don't believe they are), it's written in a way that it's impossible for there to be detectable errors in the sets. Just a blob of a certain density in a general area of the field. IMO, that should not be winning such big visual analysis, visual proficiency, and visual effect scores. I'm sure they are doing plenty of other visual things to make up for it, but they are simply not being asked to achieve in the area of big, sharp, visual forms.

In the end, the down ending (is that the final ending, or is there more) is a bit of a letdown. When Cadets and SCV ended down with Appalachian Spring, that was awesome because that captured the original perfectly. Rite of Spring does not end on a down note, so I hope there's more to be seen from BD.

[hornandsoccer]

Great review, but one little thing: Boston did Les Mis in '11, not '12.

EDIT: Also, I absolutely agree on the down ending thing.

Edited June 23, 2013 by hornandsoccer