Listening Party: Senile Sanity and Portabella

Here’s the gimmick: Each week, we’ll pick two local bands — an opening act and a headliner — link to a site where you can listen to their songs for free, then ask you to spend a few moments of your precious time to tell us what you think about them. Some may be great, others may be mediocre or awful — that’s for you to decide — all we ask is that you listen with an open mind.

Opening Act: Senile Sanity

I’m posting today from Bob’s Pretty Good Bookstore, which is owned by my stepfather, Bob Hanafin. He’s about to get a massive shipment of used books in today, requiring some volunteer manual labor, and as a result this week’s Listening Party will be a little on the brief side. Both will be reader suggestions from last week’s “Suggest A Band” column.

We start with Senile Sanity, a band I’ve been aware of for months, but which I’ve avoided writing about because I’ve already covered so many acts in the hard-rock and metal scene. Thankfully, Senile Sanity is easy enough to write about, mixing elements of mid-90′s alt-rock, more modern metal influences and some post-grunge bits and bobs. As a late-era Gen-X’er, there’s some nice references to the post-grunge movement in “Go Away,” and if I had to recommend a song, it’d be that one.

That said, I’m not wild about their music. Part of the problem is that their recordings are kind of muddy, even though it’s clear they seem to have a fairly good idea of arrangement. But there’s a lumbering, nearly slogging momentum to their songs, which I find a little off-putting. It’s like they want to write rock ballads, but are afraid to leave the trappings of hard rock behind. “For The Light,” for instance, almost borders on being a sappy rock ballad. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, it’s just that they seem to be a little reluctant to commit to the style, even for a single song. So, it’s this weird metal ballad thing that doesn’t quite work.

Overall, there’s reason to see promise in Senile Sanity’s music, but I don’t think they’ve quite found their sound yet.

Headliner: Portabella

Next up is a band is a band that manages to sound an awful lot like The Pixies on several songs, and various New Wave punk bands on others. Which isn’t really fair, because I’m actually quite a fan of The Pixies and New Wave punk. It’s almost cheating, actually. As a result, I’m not sure if I really like Portabella on their own, or if I just really like the bands they sound like so much that a band that vaguely sounds like them sounds more exciting to me than they would otherwise.

Seriously, listen to “Cheers To The Blackout” and tell me that someone hasn’t been listening to Joey Santiago’s guitar and Frank Black’s vocal style. You could do worse than sounding like The Pixies, of course, but this is almost too much. And since it doesn’t really sound original, it does put some conditions on my recommending the band outright.

I’ll give Portabella the benefit of the doubt here, and say that they know the format and style well enough that it really doesn’t matter if they’re borrowing heavily. Their songs are fun, if somewhat raw (not that that’s a bad thing), and I didn’t find one I didn’t like. They have four songs on their MySpace page, and if you like one of them, you’ll probably like all of them. If not, download a copy of Surfer Rosa to see what they were going for.

Now, it’s your turn. I’ve put my views out here on the digital page, but you can correct, amend, disagree, refute and rebut any and all of it by commenting in the field below. Notice something about the bands that I missed? Write a comment. I’ve had my say, now it’s all about you.