`Take a Picture,” Filter’s latest single, recently hit No. 10 on the pop charts. “Right next to Mariah Carey and the Backstreet Boys,” declared singer Richard Patrick at the Riviera on Wednesday night. Then he dismissed the competition with a profanity: “We play our own music. We perform our own music. We produce our own bleeping music.”
That may be true. But it would have been hard to create a more formulaic alternative-rock show than the one at the Riv. Patrick walked on stage in tight black leather pants, a white cowboy hat and mirrored sunglasses. He dove into the crowd. At one point he asked fans to hold up lighters. And each song had the same up-and-down pattern of loud, metallic guitars, moaned choruses and one hoarsely screamed syllable (like “shah!” in “It’s Gonna Kill Me”).
Bay Village, Ohio, native Patrick, who toiled briefly under Trent Reznor’s direction in the industrial-rock juggernaut Nine Inch Nails, has been leading Filter off and on since 1993. He’s a decent songwriter in the alternative-rock alienation mode–“I’d kill your father to destroy his seed,” goes one line from Wednesday’s opening song–and a first-class, voice-box-shredding shrieker. Despite the abrasive metal guitars, “Take a Picture” and the 1996 signature “Hey Man Nice Shot” have undeniable sing-along power.
And Patrick is a talented frontman, commanding attention with tiny pointing gestures and dramatic Pete Townshend leaps. He likes to dive into the crowd, re-emerging with his shirt half torn off. But his idea of artistic exploration is a guitar making machinelike sound effects (during “(Can’t You) Trip Like I Do”) or a colorful light show.
Opening with “Welcome to the Fold,” a bilious kiss-off to a friend who insists he’s “A-OK,” the quartet established its routine right away. Guitarist Geno Lenardo and bassist Frank Cavanaugh create the super-loud wall of noise, but they always defer to Patrick. (At one point Lenardo became engrossed in a feedback experiment –until Patrick shushed him with a firm wave.)
The result is bland and repetitive. Unfortunately, Lenardo isn’t inventive enough to vary the routine.
The show dipped even below “plain” once, when Filter left the stage, replaced by two dozen fans and an emcee who shouted “you wanna hear some more bleeping music?” The crowd booed and threw things until Patrick returned to assure them the display was his idea.
Alternative rock was initially a rebellious movement of musicians who couldn’t stand established rock conventions. It turned into big money in the early ’90s, when first Nirvana and Pearl Jam, then Smashing Pumpkins and Bush, began selling records by the millions. Today, it’s an established subgenre, with its own conventions and rules. Filter plays by most of them.
