Band name: Alternative Champs Origin: Charlotte, North Carolina Rating:

My first impression of Alternative Champs was a good one. Rick, one of the band’s vocalists, sent the Smackage Goat a very nice letter asking us to take a look at their website, listen to their music, and just be all around friends. Of course, I couldn’t hear their music since I don’t have my speakers plugged in at work, but I was happy to visit the website.

The site tells me that I need the latest version of the Flash plug-in. Version 7.0 won’t do. No, no, I need at least Version 8.0. Well screw that! I’m at work; I can’t download anything on this computer. Also, Flash pages annoy me. I hate how they have their own scroll bar thing so I can’t use the scroll button on my mouse. I went to their MySpace page instead.

The page looks like they’re a legitimate, professional band, or at least put a lot of effort into their photos and graphics. Nice touch!

One of their song titles is “Gay 90’s,” which I have some issues with. It should be “Gay ‘90s.” See, ‘90s is short for 1990s, which means that the “19” has been cut off, and the apostrophe should go before the 9. Also, 1990s refers to all the years that make up the decade, which means it’s plural, not a contraction for “it is,” so there should be no apostrophe between the number and the s.

After this debacle, I still wanted to give them a chance, so I read their bio. Well, that’s not entirely true. I started reading their bio, but it was reeeally long. A quick copy/paste into MS Word revealed that the bio is 610 words with only one paragraph. I’m not reading that. Could we please shorten the bio or at least break it up into a few different paragraphs? It’s tough on the eyes.

Alternative Champs gets points for style, being nice, and putting effort into their photos. However, the lazy titling of songs, lack of a pirate, long bio with no paragraph breaks, and the necessity for the latest Flash plug-in were too much for me to overcome. I give Alternative Champs two out of five stars.

Champs, I’ll leave you with the following suggestion:

smackmaster “wyamrd”

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 at 12:03 am and is filed under Deaf Music Review. 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.