Human Television is all static
Human Television/8mm Fuzz
Great Scott, Allston, Massachusetts
January 29, 2005
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in The Boston Globe, January 31, 2005
No matter the decade, it seems like 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 a part of their live indie-rock showcase The Plan, may be this year’s model, but they could have just as easily appeared in 1995 or even 1985 without any major differences in their 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. That’s not to say that plenty haven’t tried, but 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 themselves 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 clean-sounding guitars, they sounded like a too-chipper, ultracaffeinated Feelies, but whereas that band used their 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.
Openers 8mm Fuzz had all the amateurish charm of any band from any college campus, and they were 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, they 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.