On a seemingly infinite tour to support their latest record, “Villains,” Verve Pipe has played the Chicago area at least four times in the past year, and that’s just what they can remember.
With several modern rock radio hits and one across-the-board monster single, “The Freshmen,” to its credit, Verve Pipe has rapidly risen from opening act to headliners, the group’s very success serving as an object lesson for baby bands: Hopelessly catchy pop numbers and a ceaseless work ethic can take you where ingenuity and originality might not.
This is not to say that Verve Pipe, at the Vic Friday night for its second sold-out show in as many nights, doesn’t have talent (the group does, to be sure) or charm (however thin it might wear), merely that recently, artistic desires seem to be outstripping their grasp.
Sometime during the past year, Verve Pipe, East Lansing, Mich.’s answer to the question, Whatever happened to Candlebox?, has gone from a workmanlike alternative pop band to “A Band with Something to Say,” and it is not a change that seems to have done them much good.
Somewhere down the line, Verve Pipe, so good at canny, pathos-ridden pop songs like “The Freshmen,” a number guaranteed to hit every pubescent nerve, seems to have decided that it wanted not merely to be liked, but to be admired as well. They have, to that end, turned performance artists of a sort: Numbers like “Photograph” and “Penny Is Poison,” formerly unadorned, are now accompanied by back-projected slide shows, an unholy mishmash of rave-like psychedelic imprints, stock footage of grim-looking soldiers, and song lyrics.
While members of Verve Pipe may be adept musicians, they make for poor aesthetes, and the slide show is something they must be talked out of immediately.
Show opener Tonic, which sound like a cross between the Gin Blossoms and, well, the Verve Pipe, hit, as if by rote, every note in the Mid-Level Opening Band Playbook:
1.) Have one peppy, infectious hit (“Open Up Your Eyes”), to be played towards the end of the set.
2.) Effusively compliment the audience (“You guys look really great out there. You know that?”).
3.) Profess admiration and fondness for the headlining act (“We love the Verve Pipe. They’re like brothers to us”).
Unfortunately Tonic, otherwise just fine, did not have the benefit of Verve Pipe’s lighting crew: That Friday night’s show was being filmed for both a simultaneous Webcast and an upcoming PBS documentary doubtlessly contributed to the always expert Verve Pipe’s air of ultra-professionalism (even without the slide show, their vaguely grungy numbers seemed oddly inflated and brimming with portent), as well as explaining why the various band members were lit more lovingly than a Barbra Streisand movie.
