One of my favorite things about music is that it has this ability to sneak up on you when you lose all respect for it. Just when you think you’ve heard everything or discovered the best of the best, something creeps in from the background and punches you in the lip. I walked into the Bottleneck-Lawrence, Kansas’ version of CBGBs-at 9:20 p.m., just in time to grab the tail end of New York City’s Harper Blynn. Having never stumbled across this band (or having lost them somewhere in a monsoon of emails and awful press packs) I couldn’t really gauge what to expect. Turns out they were the perfect answer for the a hardcore case of feeling the ‘music journalism burnout.’
Though I only managed to see one-fourth of their set, the energy packed into that four songs was enough to leave me Googling, Wikipediaing and Myspacing the band before they left the stage. Watching them scream the lyrics “stand up,” ironically, as three hipster girls sat in the floor in front of the stage, brought a smile to my face. While their epic cover of ” Halo” by Beyonce highlighted their great use of blended vocals as an instrument. 
Thankfully, I’d get to catch them displaying their talent as the house band for both Cary Brothers and Greg Laswell.
Brothers, best known for his work with the Garden State Soundtrack, which featured “Blue Eyes,” started the set discussing his reputation for making his fans “sit in their house alone listening to his albums because they’re so depressing.” He then addressed how he approached the new album with a desire to write happier songs.
Playing several tracks off the new album, it would seem those goals were reached. With poppy, upbeat structures and lyrics reaching for the positives in life, the contrasts between Who You Are and Under Control were apparently obvious.
However, the most impressive aspects of Cary Brothers lay in the fact that unlike most artists, he can successfully balance both the upbeat and the depressing. This ability to keep his career out of the annoying pigeonholes that most artists fall into (i.e. Bright Eyes) seems to open a door for him to reach and influence an impressive spectrum of people. In an industry cluttered and watered down by photocopied and cookie cutter musicians, Cary Brother’s versatility is a breath of fresh air. He’s calm in the right places, allowing his beautiful stories to speak for themselves, while complimenting them flawlessly with just the right amount of musicality and hooks to keep them stuck in your head. It is almost blasphemy for him to waste his craft on a half empty room, if not only because they missed a pretty killer cover of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”
Having seen Greg Laswell a number of times following the release of his previous album, Three Flights From Alto Nido, it was rather refreshing to catch him on tour in support of new material. With the release of Take a Bow, comes new songs and fresh stories for Lawrence, Kansas.
Backed by Harper Blynn, Laswell sounds alive and upbeat. Even “Sing Teresa Says,” a song about his deceased grandmother, seemed to grasp a bit of happiness and power that I’ve never heard. His voice seems to reach further than usual, casting shades of the possibility of bigger venues and fuller rooms in the near future. His upcoming tour with Sara Bareilles seems to scream this fluently.
Furthermore, this night Greg seems to be leading the tightest set I’ve ever seen. Now, don’t read this wrong; I’m not trying to indicate that in previous sets that Laswell has been sloppy. Hell, I honestly think anything but that. I mean, he stole the show away from Ingrid Michaelson at The Beaumont and managed to get me to catch his set 3 or 4 times at the 2009 South by Southwest. However, this time Greg just seems completely collected. This could be nothing more than the comfort of sharing the stage with friends or as complex as penning an album of material he’s proud of. But whatever it is, it has Laswell on his game and at his best. I’ve never seen him better. 
Mixing older material like “Comes and Goes (In Waves)” and ” How The Day Sounds” with newer cuts from Take A Bow, Greg covers all his bases, pleasing his returning fans in the crowd while building on new ones. While the bar still seems half full at the evenings close, those in attendance seem pleased with the events of the evening moving their bodies and mouthing the lyrics to the songs they paid to see.
For those of you who skipped the show, you missed three singer-songwriters at their best.
