Another A Cappella Post

I am a critic.  For better or worse, it’s the part of me that never turns off.  One of my coworkers recently called me out, saying that I loved “raining on her parade.”  This whole subject is it’s own lengthy post (or set of posts), so we’ll just take it as a given and move on.

Disclaimer: I understand that others have different views and opinions than I do.  I understand that most people are not intrinsically critical and can enjoy without the need to grade or categorize or order in their mind.  I understand that this entire post can come off elitist and haterish, but that’s not my desire.  That being said, I know there’s no way I can really explain the difference in my mind between hating and critiquing; I think the distinction lies somewhere in the realm of intentionality.  I don’t nitpick because I want to destroy something people love, I want them to stop loving something that, to me, is substandard.  Sigh, even that comes off terribly.  On we go…

The finale of Sing Off 3 was, to me, terrible.  There was not one performance the whole night that arrested or captured me, that satisfied my inner critic, that I was willing to give my stamp of approval (no matter how worthless that stamp may be).  My level of criticism is some product of how much I know about something and how close that thing is to my heart.  A cappella happens to fall in some strange vortex of maximum for both those components…years of music training and years of my own painful arranging and years of hearing great groups perform live (see my ICCA post) have combined to create harsh criticism and high standards particularly for the genre of a cappella.  The higher heights you’ve seen, the sadder mediocrity seems in comparison.

I won’t get into all the specific gripes I have about the various performances, thin arrangements or unsatisfactory voices or just plain bad intonation.  I’ll just leave with this final assessment that none of the performances came even 50% to capturing their original songs.  I don’t mean that they are required to replicate the original, although that can be a way to get a high pass.  There are a multiple ways to satisfy my inner critic: instead of transforming your voices to the instrumentation, transform the song to be suited for a cappella; capture the essence of the song with much sparser instrumentation; completely flip a song on its head; etc.  All of these require incredible execution however.

Of course, it’s easy to aspire to some perfect ideal and use that to criticize, so here are some concrete examples that my brother and I happened upon in our youtube journeys yesterday (set off by a most unsatisfying time watching Sing Off).  For some reason, many of the groups are German…go figure.

Vocaldente: Saw these guys perform live and it was just insanity.  They had this youthful vibe that was completely arresting.  They have some crazy arranging, with handoffs all over the place.  As with any small group, they sacrifice parts all over the place, but still manage to sound full and complete…it’s confounding.

Stouxingers: A more jazzy group that does some more mood pieces.  Their arrangements are complex as heck, but their intonation remains spot on and they have this textural component that is out of this world.  Their rhythm and bass section is more conventional with Sing Off style groups, with the exception that it’s way way better.  Two clips, because one is off a CD and may not be a fair comparison.

Muttis Kinder: Another German group, although incredibly different from the other (or anything I’ve ever seen really).  If you want to talk about creative, this performance is almost avant garde in nature, like some weird hybrid performance, with dimensions in singing, acting, and comedy.  I was really blown away by this performance.  Somehow it captured the essence of this song while simultaneously telling a related story AND making me laugh.  Just flabbergasted.

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