Adam & Amber’s Blog

I should start all of this by saying that the lead singer of Four Finger Five is my cousin Joe, which is the entire reason that I was sitting in the Fauenthal Theater at 11:30 PM on July Fourth. That isn’t to say that Four Finger Five doesn’t have a good local following, I just don’t normally run with the local music crowd. I had been wanting to see the band live for a couple years, but I only spend at max about a week every year in Muskegon and the scheduling never worked out. This year with a concert happening downtown after the Muskegon Fireworks and me actually knowing about it before hand my sister, Amber, and I went down to the theater to get tickets after the fireworks wrapped up.

The Frauenthal is an awesome old theater with a beautiful old movie house styling and a rich history, a great place to see a performance of any kind. The show started very abruptly with a small crowd in the theater and a large crowd in the lobby getting the first of what I assume were many drinks (after whatever they had had before the fireworks). The point is most of the crowd was in some sort of altered state which made the show that much better for me, or at least made the dancing much more entertaining. The opening act was Ultraviolet Hippopotamus who played a short half hour set. The instrumentals weren’t too bad, but the singing was horribly out of tune (my guess is they couldn’t hear each other to harmonize) .

Luckily, the crowd built to a few hundred people (eyeball estimate) before Four Finger Five took the stage, introduced by my old band director Jack Adams. Keeping in mind my family connection to the band, my unbiased review is that they were awesome. They have a unique sound for a modern band, a sound more at home in the 70’s then today. Which is exactly what makes them different and unique. It also gives them freedom to incorporate more instruments into their sound including at this performance, trumpet, trombone, sax, keyboards, and a fuller percussion set. Compared to more popular sounds of today, with minimal instruments and a heavier reliance on the lead singer, the music was refreshing.

By the time they got to their last number at 2 AM (which consisted of a 15 minute jam session, including a couple of rappers from Grand Rapids who did some good but under-miked freestyling and an female R&B singer who did some uninspired and way over-miked freestyling) I was a Four Finger Five Fan.

The band’s next performance is at Summer Celebration as the opening act for INXS this Saturday. They have just finished recording their first CD under the Terrestrial Records Label which I hear is possibly due out in November. You can listen to some of their music on their website and myspace page and see the rest of my (er Beth’s) pictures here.