Human Television is all static

January 31, 2005|Globe Correspondent

No matter the decade, there's no shortage of nondescript guitar bands playing skewed pop tunes with little to no distortion and a medium-fidelity sheen born out of necessity. Human Television, who played Great Scott on Saturday as part of the club's live indie-rock showcase, the Plan, may be this year's model, but the band could just as easily have appeared in 1995 or even 1985 without any major differences in its approach, sound, or compositional sense.

So then why not here, and why not now? No reason, really, except for the fact that after 20 years or so, anybody who was going to make anything particularly substantial out of this type of music probably would have done it by now. Bands that made a career of it, like the Verlaines, seem to be the exception; more commonly, groups like Too Much Joy eventually added muscle to their sound, while Guided By Voices distinguished itself early on by weirding up something fierce and moving out of that phase entirely.

That suggests that Human Television is just undeveloped, and its 25-minute set didn't do much to dispel that notion. With Billy Downing and Boyd Shropshire briskly strumming guitars, the band sounded like a too-chipper, ultracaffeinated Feelies, but whereas that band used its dry sound to generate tension, Human Television simply blazed through quickly and efficiently, as though reaching the end of a song was the only reason for beginning it.

As a result, there was little to no sense of dynamics, and the performances never really coalesced into solid songs. Only the slower and more deliberate "Tell Me What You Want" didn't have that problem, as the sound had a chance to breathe, allowing it to work with the song rather than against it. The rest of the time, Human Television sounded like every other indie-pop band at the start of its career.

Opener 8mm Fuzz had all the amateurish charm of any band from any college campus and was just as significant. Playing what sounded at times like a rhythm-heavy cross between the Talking Heads and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to an audience that appeared to be filled with friends, not fans, the band struggled with an occasionally unsteady beat and mannered singing that seemed like a conscious imitation of frenzied alt-rock singers rather than a natural expressive style.