Massillon-Before the Rain

[profhill]

Yesterday was a great day for Drum Corps. It was cool, it didn't rain until after the show was over. The stadium was great. I got good seats the day of the show.

I arrived late so I didn't not see Pioneer and Southwind.

Colts-They certainly are better designed than last year. The show doesn't bother me, in fact I found it rather entertaining. They just aren't very good.

Glassmen-After seeing them last week in C-ville I was pretty sure that they were the on'es going to be left out of finals; I'm not so sure this week. But, they still have major issues that won't be fixed by next Friday, mostly stupid design things.

Boston-By FAR my favorite corps of the night!!!!! Their hornline is much improved over the last few years. Their color guard is really good. Their show is interesting. My only problem with them is that the narration was developed enough. It would have been more effective if they had included more. It just sounds sort of half-hearted the way it is now. This really was the only corps of the night that I wanted to go march with. If I lived on the east coast and was of marching age, I'd so be in Boston (or Florida) for their first camp next year.

In the words of my friend: "It's nice to see that they can be so artsy and still be a kick-### drum corps."

Phantom-Well the staff certainly has taken to heart that they needed to do more drill. Unfortunatly, what they didn't figure out is that drill for drill's sake isn't effective. What actually needed to happen was that they needed to do BETTER drill, not nessecarily more. Here's the new key phrase for Phantom's visual package next year "Less is More." I really liked them last year, but this show just isn't very good.

The guard is blahhh (Those uniforms are nasty.)

The hornline is ok, not great (lots of performance cleanliness issues.)

They can't march.

Throughout the show it seemed like the staff made sure that they were constantly marching, when what they needed to do was think about what was creating the effect.

All of these were design issues. They have lots of talent in that corps. It was almost the biggest waste of talent, but then I saw:

The Cadets-What can I say, but this was a whole lot of nothing!!!!!!

It was 10 minutes of the same thing, which wasn't very interesting the first time they did it.

The music is ok (definately something fresh, but not really interesting), the drill was there (nothing special), the guard was there.

There was basically nothing redeeming about this show, except the level of performance.

The horns are good, their pretty clean.

But no matter how well they play and how clean they get it won't matter, the show is just a big bag of crap.

They are very lucky that the members are very talented because they'd be in trouble if they weren't.

Now, I have a diatribe about much I used to like The Cadets, but I will save that for another time.

Bluecoats-My second favorite corps of the night.

This is my favorite Bluecoats EVER!!!!!!!

The slow piece is a little too long. The opener and closer kick ###. They need to clean some. (I though they had a really good show for a home show, which are usually bad performances because of the other things that are going on)

10 year ago this performance would have finished in the top 5, isn't it great to see how much better the activity is. The highest they can finish is 6th and that means beating Phantom, which isn't out of the realm of possibility, since Phantom isn't overly clean.

But even if they finish 8th (behind Scouts) they are really good this year and will certainly be able to recruit better because of this effort.