Bulletin E-Edition:
Flowmotion performed at last year’s 4 Peaks Music Festival near Tumalo. They’ll play The Summit
Saloon & Stage next week.
Submitted photo
Flowmotion, Izabella to play a show in Bend
By Ben Salmon / The Bulletin
Published: May 08. 2009 4:00AM PSTThree years ago, Seattle’s Flowmotion played at The Grove in Bend, and frontman Josh Clauson told The Bulletin his band hoped to distance itself from the dreaded, rife-with-connotations “jam band” tag.
“We’re trying to avoid the label of ‘jam band,’” he said. “We want to be able to cross over.”
Of course, in the same interview, Clauson acknowledged Flowmotion’s affinity for endless noodling: “At the live show — yeah — we jam,” he said.
Spend a little time at the band’s MySpace (www.myspace.com/flowmotionmusic) and you’ll quickly get a taste for both sides of Flowmotion. The studio cuts — “How I Know” and “What’s Been” — are pristine, four-minute slices of perfectly pleasant pop-rock. The former has a massive Coldplay/U2 kind of feel, and the latter sounds straight from the Jack Johnson and John Mayer School of Lazy, Good-Times Tunes.
Neither song goes on too long. Both are instantly memorable.
The live recordings, on the other hand, stretch beyond five, six minutes, with guitars soloing and wah-wah pedals wah-wah-ing into oblivion. It’s this side of Flowmotion that has won over fans at the jam-happy High Sierra and Joshua Tree music festivals, plus Central Oregon’s own 4 Peaks fest.
The key point, though, is this: In neither incarnation does Flowmotion indulge the kind of interminable, instrumental jam that makes a jam band so popular with some, but so difficult to digest for the rest of us. In other words, even live these guys have an inner pop soul that keeps the music on the right track: highly listenable and with light at the end of the tunnel.
Flowmotion, with opener Izabella ; 9 p.m. Thursday; $10; The Summit Saloon & Stage, 125 N.W. Oregon Ave., Bend; info@thegrove411.net or www .myspace.com/thegrovebend.
ARTICLE ACCESS: This article is among those available to all readers. Many more articles are available only to E-Edition members. Sign up today!
comments powered by Disqus
