Listening Party: GTA And Schottsy

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: GTA

I generally don’t write about cover bands. The reason for this is simple enough: By definition, cover bands aren’t playing their own music, and as such the boundaries of the discussion are limited to how well they performed someone else’s song. Speaking very broadly, cover bands also exist as a business, and are very much about delivering what the audience wants to hear rather than expressing some emotion or creating a new work of art. That’s not to say that there aren’t good local cover bands or that they’re not valid musicians. In fact, some of the most talented performers I’ve encountered have had “day jobs” working in cover bands. It just means that the cover bands themselves aren’t terribly interesting to write about.

So why am I writing about GTA, a Spartanburg-based band that plays mostly covers for an audience that appears to mostly be interested in songs they already know? Because GTA appears to be testing the waters of performing originals, and that’s very interesting to me. It a risky move, even for a band that’s not performing anything all that interesting in the first place.

While there are quite a few success stories of bands who make that great leap of faith from dutifully performing other people’s songs to performing their own material, in my experience, doing so successfully is a rare thing. Performing music competently — even passionately — isn’t the same thing as writing lyrics, creating a melody or crafting an arrangement of sounds to make a complete song. It’s a similar difference between being a good actor and being a good playwright, for instance.

Although I can’t say that GTA’s lone original track on their MySpace page, “Out The Door,” really speaks to me, but it’s at least as well-performed as their covers. I can’t say I like it — it does nothing for me at all — but it’s not bad for what it is.

Granted, their covers don’t do anything for me, either. I’m not exactly a fan of The Killers or their song “All These Things That I’ve Done,” for instance, so it’s not like I’m holding GTA to a high standard. And while I find all of their arrangements a little on the sloppy side, I’ve certainly heard worse in my time.

So, if you have a moment and feel like taking a bit of a risk listening to a band that doesn’t have it together yet, you could do worse than listening to GTA. Their recordings suffer from being recorded live — complete with random women screaming “WOOOO!” every so often — but they do seem to have a basic grasp of putting a song together, and may well be worth keeping an eye on as they venture out into new musical territory.

Headliner: Schottsy

It’s a strangely rare thing to find a performer who doesn’t seem to shy away from being labeled, even if those labels are admittedly imperfect. On his MySpace page, Pete Schottsy describes his music as sounding like “a record you lifted off dad’s shelf,” which is probably accurate if your dad was a fan of the pop-folk movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.

A great many musicians would buck at the having a term like “neo-’60′s folk” tacked onto their music. It’s as if owning up to an influence is somehow equal to being a cheap-knock off. And while this is, on occasion, absolutely accurate of some musicians and their projects, an influence can also be just that; something that serves as a guide in the creation of a new work of art.

Schottsy, to his credit, seems perfectly willing to own up to his influences, even going so far as to claim that his music aim to fill “every nook & cranny” with “neo-1960s, folk sound.” And while there are clearly ideas borrowed and riffed on from that time in pop music, it’s also obvious that these are influences rather than just outright stylistic shoplifting.

A great example is the song “Sophie Marie,” which sounds very much like a post-Revolver Beatles song. But, while it’s clearly using some of the same ideas, it’s not exactly a knock off. The song sounds familiar — not unlike how the Beatles own works sounded familiar in their era, because they were “influenced” by black R&B artists from a decade before — but it’s clearly got something original and specific on it’s mind. It’s just using an familiar format to get it across.

And the influences don’t end there: You can hear more than a little Simon & Garfunkel in songs like “Never Enough,” and little bits of the Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys and a goodly helping of very modern indie folk vocal on ’60s-sounding songs like “Looking for a Name.” And yet, even with all of those influences and inspirations being present, at no point does it feel like these songs are anything but original.

Schottsy is a musician who clearly knows his way around when it comes to writing folky pop songs, and because of that, I can recommend purely on his own merits. This isn’t someone I’m saying is relatively good on the local scale, for instance. He’s actually pretty listenable on his own terms, and that would be true if he was playing on the radio just as much at the Sunday Songwriters Showcase at Sonny’s.

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.