Boston alt-rock quartet The Fair Enough are banking on the notion you'll share in their nostalgia for Kool-Aid, the Letter People, and Pong. Says singer/guitarist Stu Dietz, "I like to think we pick up where early 80's music was headed before video [+]Boston alt-rock quartet The Fair Enough are banking on the notion you'll share in their nostalgia for Kool-Aid, the Letter People, and Pong. Says singer/guitarist Stu Dietz, "I like to think we pick up where early 80's music was headed before video actually did kill the radio star." Bridging the gap between finely crafted pop arrangements and reckless rock abandon, The Fair Enough's music blends new wave, Brit pop, and Americana, evoking elements of the Talking Heads, Police, and The Who, as well as modern hipsters Coldplay, Phish, and Franz Ferdinand. While the dynamics and spontaneity of their live shows have been turning heads since their inception in mid-2004, it is the songs which are the real strength of the band--great songs that are catchy yet inventive, challenging yet accessible; whether it's the new wave disco drive of What Lies Within, the turn-on-a-dime dynamics of The Undertow, or the face-melting punch of You Know I'm Right.
Leading the musical charge are the vocals and guitar wizardry of Dietz, a Nebraska native and former member of Boston Music Award nominee Hazie Maze. Dietz hooked up with keyboardist/singer Aaron Rosenthal, a conservatory-trained composer, through an internet message board. As luck would have it, the two lived only a block apart in Boston's bustling Fenway neighborhood, a coincidence which immediately fostered a collaborative songwriting partnership. Rosenthal quickly recruited jazz drummer extroardinaire Brandon Erdos who had just completed his psychiatry residency and appropriately goes by the nickname "Doc B." amongst bandmates. The trio then went through several bassists until the arrival of Jim Larkin, a talented multi-instrumentalist and popular sideman in the local Boston scene, and the lineup was complete.
(There is a long story about how Larkin and Dietz had actually met six months earlier at a raging Halloween party. Apparently, a certain guitarist, experiencing a major case of the "beer goggles," kept harrassing Larkin about his remarkable resemblance to Greg Kinnear. Names were not exchanged, and the two did not meet again until the bassist showed up to audition for the band. The rest, as they say, is history. Incidentally, Larkin denies such a likeness to the actor; Dietz, on the other hand, is
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