A&E

Wild Child and Darryl Rahn ring in new semester of Acoustic Coffeehouses

By Alex Witonsky ’17

February 10, 2015

CAB put on what looked to be the most-attended coffeehouse this academic year. Despite opening delays of about half an hour, a large crowd filed into the barn to take their seats or to remain standing in a solid row along the upper balcony.

Darryl Rahn  and his band took the stage after a long wait, looking the part of eager and only slightly nervous college-musicians. A preliminary bout of screeching microphones left the audience cringing, but Rahn quickly corrected the volume levels.

Loud-to-soft dynamics saturate his pop-folk ballads. He plays the guitar with skill; his drummer with his respective kit does not. The keyboard player lilts as his hands knock about and the bassist just seems to groove out, bending his knees every once in a while. The sound of Rahn’s voice matches his physique—it is high, rounded and childish, but functional. He was comfortable onstage, exhibiting his radiant charisma.

Rahn pays his dues to all the tropes common to the genre of acoustic rock.  He sings about loves lost, the journey back home, wild times with wild friends  and what it means to come of age.  What he’s doing has been done to death, and maybe it’s the combination of both his youth and eagerness which made his recycled sentiments on ineffable angst and industry-standard themes seem all the more artificial. In the words of a friend, it was, “basically cliché.” Seeing a mass-market mentality filter down to this level of grassroots musicianship (Darryl Rahn is a native to Utica) feels wrong. Maybe the author’s irritability and paranoia is qualified: Darryl Rahn studied songwriting and the music-industry at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Regardless, friend and I are powerless to deny a simple fact, that the music “sounds good.”

After a warm farewell and a long set from from Darryl Rahn, Wild Child, an Indie-pop act from Austin, Texas took the stage. Their sound was a radical departure from Rahn’s. In fact, the band was wholly unique.  At SXSW the Austin Chronicle awarded Wild Child with the high honor of being the Best Indie Hipster Band in 2013 and 2014. Flirty  ukulele  riffs bounce off Kelsey Wilson’s vocals and cello, creating an atmosphere of jubilance. Drums beat and fade away as Wilson and Alexander Beggins’ vocals conjoin and diverge. The band produces a warm, playful, and quirky sound.

Most of what they played was “new,” with one or two songs from previous albums “Pillow Talk” and “The Runaround.” Towards the middle of their set, their playing roused a crowd of students to their feet  and they started dancing. Smiles lit up the faces of Biggins and Wilson. The night was a success.

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