Milking fame for all it’s worth

While on my home from work this afternoon, I heard two bands within ten minutes of each other that got me to thinking. I am talking of the New Amsterdams and A Perfect Circle. The two bands, despite the fact that they were being played on the same station, couldn’t have been more dissimilar… or could they?

The reason I ask this question is because while the New Amsterdams are a piano pop band, and A Perfect Circle is a gloomy kinda-metal band, they are both side projects. The New Amsterdams are the side project of Matt Pryor from the Get Up Kids and A Perfect Circle is Maynard from Tool‘s. But the fact that they’re both side projects is not the point I’m going for.

See, both side projects are from the frontmen to other bands. This leads to a dilemma- recognizability. The lead singer of a band has a distinctive voice. You hear his or her voice, and you’re immediately going to think that it’s a performance by their “main” band. It takes a special sort of side project to really make the side project seem worthwhile. If the side band’s musical stylings are remarkably similar to the main band’s, there’s going to be the inevitable critical backlash that the side project (Y) sounds sounds like leftovers from the main band (X).

Such is the X vs. Y dilemma that occurs with Pryor and Maynard. To the average music fan (and even to me, who listens to dozens of new cds each month), the differences between Pryor’s X and Y and Maynard’s X and Y are not readily apparent. To me, both bands from both performers sound pretty much the same. It takes some thorough listening to detect what end up being pretty subtle (and minor) differences.

In the case of the New Amsterdams vs. the Get Up Kids, the differences were much more readily apparent on the first New Amsterdams’ record, Never You Mind. That release was primarily Pryor and a guitar, in a very Dashboard Confessional sort of way. After that, the records became nearly indistinguishable from Get Up Kids albums, and the Get Up Kids’ On A Wire was so acoustic, it may as well have been a New Amsterdams record.

With A Perfect Circle and Tool, it’s pretty much clear-cut, at least to me. A Perfect Circle sounds like Tool, but with the chugging guitars replaced by more melodic guitar lines. It essentially sounds like all the slow parts to Tool’s songs. And I’d like to think that the guys in Tool would never have allowed the recently released cover songs atrocity Emotive, in which Maynard and company suck all the life and joy out of songs by artists such as John Lennon, Black Flag, and others. That is neither here nor there, however.

The thing is, side projects can work. Phil Anselmo from Pantera formed Superjoint Ritual, which was also a metal band. However, Superjoint has made a couple albums that sounded nothing like the sludgy, Lynyrd Skynyrd by way of Black Sabbath sound of Pantera. As a matter of fact, Superjoint sounds like the fastest, loudest, evilest speed metal I’ve heard in years. There’s no confusing one for the other. Sadly, that’s one of the few exceptions.