Dartmouth Soundoff: SPLASHH at BG

By Margarette Nelson, The Dartmouth Staff | 5/1/13 9:00am


Friday night at 9 p.m., I awoke to the sounds of thick bass drifting into my window and hanging in the pitch black of my dorm room. A sound check at Bones Gate Fraternity, which is literally a stone's throw from my window, meant that nap time was over.


A couple hours later I was in BG. It was early; there were relatively few people there — no more than fifteen in the basement. Nevertheless, the energy on all levels of the house was stirring. People were chattering in the main foyer and the upstairs hallways, and music blasted from the speakers on the first floor. Around 11:30 p.m., you could hear brothers encouraging each other and their guests to make their way to the first floor as Splashh was about to start.

 

In the main room where the band was set up, a few more than a dozen were gathered. The drummer started to hit the snare to the beat of the music playing over the speakers. The soundboard turned the music down and Splashh kicked off their performance to a few enthusiastic individuals.

 

By 11:45 p.m., the main room was comfortably full. Toward the front of the room, the crowd was thick and as shovey as you would expect at any rock concert.

 

As for the performance, Splashh certainly had merit. Temporally, the band was as tight as they come; changes in tempo ran like a well-oiled machine. The synchrony with which the band members seemed to be breathing was perceivable from the bathrooms on the second floor. Literally. In fact, the only complaint I heard about the performance was that the band was simply too loud. If that's the only bad thing I have to say about the performance, considering the venue and the type of show the band was trying to put on, Splashh seems to be in pretty good shape.

 

Let me elaborate, however. While all four band members were on the same page with their timing, the volume of the performance made the show seem like a combat scene. The thick bass that clung to the air in my room earlier was now the ground to the battlefield over which the guitars and effects shoved each other around like rowdy individuals did in the crowd. The vocals didn't sit above the music, but instead fought from behind. These washed out vocals, though, are signature to their sound in their studio recordings, so if they intended to replicate it in live shows, then kudos to them.

 

By the time their set was over an hour later, the basement was full, and the crowd in the main room had turned into the kind where if you lost the friends you came out with you probably weren’t going to find them. The energy in the room was primed for the main act, The Generationals.

 

Splashh, while fairly well-recognized in the UK, is making their first impact on the American market this month as they travel from Alabama to New England to the West Coast, making a stop in Hanover. Their latest album Comfort is scheduled to be released on June 3. The band members seemed to enjoy their time at Dartmouth, playing pong with BG brothers before the show and sticking around afterwards as The Generationals performed and Friday night raged on.

 


Margarette Nelson, The Dartmouth Staff