T-Rock Entertainment presented its “Monthly Bill,” a monthly showcase for local Dallas music, Saturday night at Firewater Bar and Grill in Dallas in an effort to restore the city’s “fleeting” local music scene.
T-Rock President Mike Tomaso began hosting the “Monthly Bills” last October after he noticed a drop in Dallas’ once thriving appreciation for local musical talent.
“We’re doing these shows for the right reasons. This is a concert created to put four or five solidified local Dallas bands together all on the same show,” he said. “We began doing these shows in October and got really good feedback from the community. The fact that we have all of these new artists on one stage makes it a really successful like, super-show.”
Saturday’s show featured the bands Pistol Whippin Ike, Benzley, Seven Story Drop, Superstring and Kessler. Pistol Whippin Ike and Kessler have members that are also SMU students.
“Each band is handpicked from an elite group of bands that are currently getting the most attention from the fans, the media and the industry,” Tomaso said.
The Virgin Megastore joined with T-Rock this month to help promote the up-and-coming artists featured in the program. Saturday afternoon, the bands were onsite at the Mockingbird Station location for CD signings and interviews. Left Ear Radio, an Internet-based radio station, broadcasted the event.
T-Rock’s intentions of putting on a “best of the local scene” showcase every month is noble in that it claims to be helping out Dallas music by presenting the very best in local talent. However, by simply attending one of these showcases, it becomes blatantly obvious that T-Rock is by no means attempting to further local music. The bands featured in concert make this fact easy enough to understand. They are pumping out the same over-played sound employed by a million other bands whose only musical aspirations are to rip off the already exhausted genres of faux-emo, a la Story of the Year, or uninspired alt-grunge, a la Nickelback, and to get on 102.1 The Edge by doing so.
By holding these monthly showcases featuring the same types of bands month after month, T-Rock is simply tapping into the popularity of the artists whom the bands poorly imitate. It sees there is already a market for these styles of music and doesn’t bother with straying from what sells in order to find Dallas’ true local talent.
The true intentions behind these showcases aren’t to lend a hand in helping out a “fleeting” scene but instead to turn a profit through stunting its growth.
However, the fault doesn’t just rest solely on T-Rock for continuing to run these depleted genres into the ground. In fact, a great deal of it also lies within the hands of the local bands featured in these concerts.
It’s not that these people are especially untalented at what they do or even in a bad band. It’s just that their music so painfully unoriginal and cliched that it almost isn’t even music, resembling instead some sort of poorly constructed game of charades or name that tune.
Both T-Rock and the local acts featured should take this as an opportunity to better themselves in order to better serve this city.
If T-Rock looked just a little bit harder, it might find that Dallas’ scene is hardly “fleeting” and actually has a great wealth of bands that are both innovative and talented. These are the bands that should be featured in showcases, heard by eager ears and given the opportunity not just for being different, but because they actually deserve it.
Further, the bands featured in Saturday’s concert just need to learn how to take chances with their music and not to continue to follow what every other band is doing just to get on the radio. With everyone sincerely working towards the common good of progressing Dallas music, how could anything possibly go wrong?
