By Sean Moeller

The night started with American Princes singer/guitarist Collins Kilgore being a witness to a hit and run outside the Iowa venue the band was playing this night. [This is truth.]

By the time the evening had turned into morning, it was plain to see that these boys from Arkansas would never stand around in one place long enough to ever meet a similar fate. They dodge stagnancy and sidestep the weird little conventions we just take for granted and sometimes get sickened by in our rock and roll bands: establishing an identifiable sound and going with the one singer and one songwriter approach. The Princes are simply unable to express themselves the same way twice in a row, going for sentimentality, compact pop nuggets in one breath and then turning on a dime into a melodic sandstorm, where you’re being hit in the cheeks by tiny granules of agitation, sweet sweat and pieces of the wall as co-singer and songwriter David Slade goes into a Steven Bays zone for brief periods of time. They’re much like Ambulance Ltd. in their approach of keeping the creative process – and tonight – a live show on a moving sidewalk and it could explain why it took that pop secret of Ambulance three years of touring before anyone was paying any attention to its super dope debut record. It could be a similar fate for the Princes.

The band – all triangles, razor blade corners and no meat bassist Luke Hunsicker and drummer Matt Quin fill out the group – is a sketch comedy show without the comedy, coming from a different angle with each spot on the set list. The night floats along with Kilgore’s delectable “The Simple Life” and “Never Grow Old” rubbing shoulders with Slade’s hectoring, pushy gems “Stolen Blues” and “Taste the Rainbow,” as if this dinky crowd of a dozen people were being presented with a split personality to solve or make out. “The Simple Life” – three songs into the set – is where the night really began as the band was still working out some of the buzz it had developed with the five hours of down time spent sitting around in the bar. It was playing over-the-top as if to show the remaining souls that they were going to be given their money’s worth. Initially, it was costly to the songs. Slade was wild and later showed that he could make it work for him. But there were times when he just let it fly – right into the fan – and his feathers came out sheared. Then again, sometimes he made it through the blades unscathed, when his exuberance – the need to be triumphant in looking like he’s rocking to the mostest – was held in check.

It didn’t help matters any at the beginning of the set when the lead singer from Midstates – their tourmates from Chicago – was up on stage, wherever he wanted to be, windmilling with an American Princes T-shirt in hand and mindlessly inserting himself into a show he no longer belonged in, drunk or not drunk. His antics were a distraction and led Kilgore to comment following “Stolen Blues,” “It appeared David caught fire and a leprechaun came out of nowhere to put him out.” It wasn’t a knock, but someone should have had good sense to put him in his place.

With an album as good as “Less and Less,” all it’s going to take for American Princes to be a ubiquitous part of the nation’s soundscape – where their at the back of every throat and the tip of every tongue – is time and a little control. It’s difficult to think that they won’t get it done. | April 27 : Vaudeville Mews