STAND

THE ROAD NOT THE MAP



Jeff Miers



Music Critic



The Buffalo News



February 2010



A great song is one thing. A great band is another.



Loving a song is diving into a one-night stand, a fling, a bit of mindless self-indulgence.



Falling for a band is entering into a love affair.



One-night stands are fun, and anyone who denies as much is a liar. They make you forget yourself for a while, lose your burden in someone else for a bit. Eventually, you wake up and deal with the image in the glass on your own, though. Beard scruff, whiskey breath, red eyes and all.



Right now, so many tell us that it's all about the song, that democratic gangs of musicians joined as bands are not as important as the unjustly inflated personality of the walking-ego-with-the-microphone out front. With this has come the cry of a bloodthirsty mob heralding the death of the album. It's not the big picture that matters, but the quick snapshot taken on a cell phone and distributed to thousands via Facebook by the time you've snapped the next one.



Forget it and move on. Buy the single on iTunes, and sod the rest of the record. I mean, really - who has the time to care?



From the beginning, Stand was a band, and one that knew well the difference between a fling and the real thing. Right out of the gate, the four musicians came across as limbs on the same body. They seemed to have transcended themselves, to have arrived already living in the heady air most spend a lifetime trying to locate, getting lost on the way because they've confused the map for the road.



Hearing the band's majestic, broad, flailing gesture of a sound was to feel oneself in the presence of something bigger than the four men making that sound.



Recall that you've had this feeling before, of course.



Maybe the first time you heard Bowie, or the Replacements, or R.E.M, or U2, or Radiohead, or the Flaming Lips, or even Coldplay, if that's as far as your imagination will allow you to go. Whatever it was, and whoever happened to be channelling it, the odds are, it showed you some avenue out of your cul de sac of the moment. Great bands do what songs heard in passing and forgotten about immediately thereafter can't - they renew your faith, and remind you why you fell in love with music in the first place.



Yes, yours truly fell for Stand, and hard, from the first gig. I knew it would stick, too, when I woke up the next morning to find I still respected myself.



Neil Eurelle, Alan Doyle, Carl Dowling and David Walsh had about them the mark of many of my big loves past - the big, anthemic sound that made the hair stand at attention on your forearms; the impossible to fake blend of everyman approachability and alien otherness; the populist roar of the World Cup anthem and the art-school irreverence of Berlin-period Bowie; the ethereality of the grainy cinema snob flick and the back-alley grit of the indelible guitar riff.



I heard traces of (and saw faces from) home in their songs - the searing passion of "The Unforgetable Fire," (and not just cuz they're Irish lads) the edgy grandeur of "The Bends," and the rip-your-heart-out yearning of the Waterboys killing "The Whole of the Moon." And that first gig when I realized that Pearl Jam was going to be something much more than a nostalgia act trumpeting the virtues of the golden age of grunge, too - Doyle has that sinewy, gruff grace evident in the best that Eddie Vedder can offer.



Till now, it is perhaps fair to say, Stand in concert and Stand on album have been two different things. The songs were always there, but now, the connective tissue is working its magic, too. The album you hold in your mitts - for it is indeed one of those, though like all great albums before it, it's at least five singles deep, and that's being a little bit stingy - is "100,000 Ways To Harvest Hope," and listening to it with open heart is certainly one of those ways. All the urgency, conviction, sense of both playfulness and wide-eyed wonder, the stadium-sized balls that makes a night with Stand one you won't regret come sunrise - they're here.



If you're so goddamn busy that you can only spin one song, make it "No Regrets". This, for my money, is the ticket that provides the most rapid transit to Stand land, as Doyle's falsetto welcomes you at the door of a hall filled with mirrors, ones reflecting shimmering chord progressions, and sparse, subtle dynamic interplay in the guitar department, with the necessary brutish wallop of gentleman-rogue drummer Dowling making sure you don't miss the point and forget the way back out.



Do that, and you'll be spinning the whole platter like an addict on a bender by sundown.



Stand is a band.



And "100,000 Ways to Harvest Hope" is the road itself, not merely the map.



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