I’ve run into a lot of shitty music in Sacramento. So much in fact, that I usually find myself overlooking the area in favor of spending a weekend in the bay. Out of a complete stroke of luck, I caught The Refinery at a small dive bar on the far side of midtown.  After the show, I was shocked to find out that they were locals. With what I’ve seen of Sacramento, if I were grading on a curve, they’d be the guys that nobody would want in the class.

The Refinery just finished up an EP titled Heavy Feet. It’s a fairly straight-forward release comprised of five tracks that do a decent job of summing up the group’s sound. Tom Cianci has proven himself to be a capable frontman (Just imagine a young Billy Joel meets Coldplay), and I see good things in their future… However… I hit a few snags while listening to this CD over the previous week.

Objectively, I can say that most of my cringes came from the technical side of the house. On more than one instance, the guitar was mixed in disproportionately high, overpowering everything else going on in the song. Having heard them live in the past, I’m more inclined to wave a finger at whoever did the initial mixdown. During “I won’t let you down“, A few of the drum fills seemed a bit out of wack… I’m not sure if they were intentional, but they cluttered the flow of the song considerably. As always of course, this is all just IMHO.

With those caveats out of the way, I can easily say that these guys show great potential. Heavy Feet, with it’s flaws, is still a good CD that will continue to be heard in my rotation for some time to come. It’s made my commutes to/from work and other places throughout the week a bit more enjoyable. With a year or two of work, some new material, more financial backing, and a little luck… success should come easy for The Refinery.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 13th, 2007 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Teh RAWK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.