Listening to O.A.R.’s studio albums, I had a lot of trouble getting into their sound. I kept comparing them to Dispatch, and they could not compare. “Here We Go” and “Bats in the Belfry” grabbed me from the opening beat; “Night Shift” and “Stir It Up” never really did. Dispatch’s reggae felt like rock – it had genuine excitement. O.A.R.’s reggae felt kind of…bland – like multicultural music featured in a PBS pledge drive. It was also hard to get past the wedding band blare of the saxophone and the idea that their preppy audience would really be “about a revolution.” If a revolution consisted of occasionally alternating polo with plaid, maybe; otherwise, I could not see it.
When I actually got to the 9:30 Club, though, and listened to O.A.R. live, I found that I really liked them. “Hey Girl” started slowly and built the crowd into it; the whole song felt smooth. “Crazy Game of Poker” did an even better job of this. The rhythm shift thirty seconds in had me jumping up and down.
The way frontman Marc Roberge directly engaged the audience was also impressive. He did not ignore them or insist they were the best audience ever, as so many do. He was just honest with them. A couple of songs in, he admitted, “Sorry we haven’t said much. We just want to play good music.” He then made that music better by making relevant changes in the lyrics. In “About Mr. Brown,” he changed “how about this weather” to “how about this D.C. weather.” This was not a cheap pander; he was acknowledging the unseasonably warm D.C. weather without missing a beat! The way he half spoke the lines during “Love and Memories” was equally effective.
The clear high point of the concert was “I Feel Home” – the song with the line “home to me is reality, and I need something real.” What really sold the song, besides the lyrics and the fact that O.A.R.’s actual home is thirty minutes from DC, was Roberge’s intro: “We wrote this next song sitting on a driveway in Rockville. It’s about people we don’t get to see all the time, and it makes us really happy.” As their hero in “Anyway” would say, when music like that hits you, you feel no pain…
Grade: B+
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