On Feb. 12 the Student Center Programs Council (SCPC) hosted Moon Tunes, the second performance in a concert series that was originally meant to occur monthly. While there was quite a bit more than a single month between last year’s concert on Sept. 18 and last week’s addition, the waiting was not particularly long considering the less than stellar support of SCPC’s endeavor and the corresponding absence of eager anticipation. This time, though, the concert was held inside, abandoning its namesake and the rest of the outdoors. No one was complaining, as concert goers enjoyed the warmth, lack of wind and hot chocolate supplied within the confines of Under the Couch on the second floor of the Student Center.
In addition to the hot chocolate, SCPC representatives were also handing out raffle tickets and advertisements for various upcoming events. These included a rather peculiar flier for GT Night at the Aquarium, which was stapled to a bag of off brand Goldfish which were shaped like penguins.
Before the advertised band, The 49 Sound, took the stage, a few Tech students performed some well-known songs with their own spin. The first year students Hannah Tillman and Natalie Seman switched off between singing and playing guitar, backing each other in their musical enterprise.
The two amateur musicians started off with a rendition of Lorde’s “Royals” and continued through some other songs, including Imagine Dragon’s “Radioactive,” which had some of the audience mouthing the words along with them. Their singing brought a new dynamic to the popular songs, making them fresh and enjoyable, even to those few in the audience who were not sorority sisters of the performers. The guitar, on the other hand, amounted to little more than strumming the same chord ad nauseum. For their finale, the two welcomed “our good friend Spencer” to the stage to take over on the guitar. Fortunately, the singing was respectable enough to overshadow the lack of variety on the guitar, and their musical opening for The 49 Sound was commendable.
Between the two Tech students and the advertised band, an SCPC representative took the stage to raffle off tickets to “Build it With Your Bear Hands,” one of their events scheduled for the next day.
After this quick raffle, The 49 Sound, the main band but not necessarily the main attraction, started to perform. Throughout their performance, many of the audience left, having come to see their friends perform and not being interested in the main performers. Even dedicating one of the songs “to the Zeta Sisters” was not enough to make them stay. In defense of those who left, the dedicated song was not a particularly stellar rendition of John Mayer’s “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room,” a song that is not good to begin with. In addition to the blues song, The 49 Sound played several originals including pieces from their as yet unreleased EP tentatively named Phases.
While their music and songs were fine in their own right, what scared the remaining audience was the volume of the performance. It was easy to feel the music, in addition to hearing it, and the audience was hard put to hear anything but the overzealous speakers, making this a true rock concert instead of the advertised “hours of peace and music” from SCPC. The ridiculous volume probably also accounted for the difficulty in understanding the lyrics because when they chose to perform a quieter song, it was possible to follow its story instead of the eardrum-shattering instruments. The 49 Sound was a fine band and gave a performance worth witnessing, but their choice of speaker volume was their downfall for many audience members, making the area outside Under the Couch probably the best place to enjoy their music
After the concert’s end, SCPC took the stage again for another raffle. Since so many people had left, the raffle was awarded to a random audience member, thus ending the assault on the audience’s temporarily deafened ears and the concert in general. The room was quickly vacated by the concert-goers who had bothered to stay until the end, each going their separate way, for the most part having enjoyed the night.