Monday, October 6, 2008

At Merriweather Post Pavilion on Saturday with his band Seether, Shaun Morgan flaunted poor posture, painful piercings, faded tattoos and badly applied eyeliner and hair dye. The look was poorly put together and depressing, sort of like an old neighborhood where zoning regulations have gone unenforced.

But it's a fine style for a downer rock band's frontman. And since its 2002 debut, Seether has been accused of borrowing too much from arena rock's most downer outfit ever, Nirvana. Morgan and his South African mates did nothing on this night to shake those charges.

Tunes such as "Needles" and "Take Me Away," for example, started out slow with heavily chorused guitar-string plucking or strumming while Morgan mumbled about self-worthlessness, before power chords and big drums kicked in and Morgan began shrieking about self-worthlessness.

So even as damaged as Morgan seems to be, the combo of whisper-to-scream music and woe-is-me themes have become so cliche since Kurt Cobain took his life that it's hard for folks who had radios back then to take Seether's act too seriously. And it doesn't help that Seether occasionally sinks to Nickelbackish generic grunge, as with "Because of Me" and "Rise Above This."

Yet, novel or not, the show produced its cathartic moments. "Broken," a power ballad for the lovelorn that was originally recorded as a duet between Morgan and Evanescence's Amy Lee, was turned into an unplugged and powerful crowd singalong. And "Fake It," the big rock radio hit from last year's CD "Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces," is a fine fist-pumping anthem.

Morgan said he wasn't intending "to imitate a band" while introducing the set's lone cover, a note-perfect re-creation of Stone Temple Pilots' "Creep." That song has been mistaken for a Nirvana tune since its 1993 release.

-- Dave McKenna