UNIVERSE CONTEST
It’s rare for a band to be great and be the first band its members are in. Not to say that the bands that the guys from Universe Contest have been in weren’t damn good, but something is going on with this incarnation that never quite clicked completely in the way it does now. The press has been universally (pardon the pun) positive in its praise of the band. Fans in the crowd have been rowdy, smiling and singing along, and the band has found itself in a position of having multiple songwriters that can bring something to the table, creating an infectious sound that varies from discord to harmony within the same song in a way that always keeps the listener enthralled.
The lineup includes Tim Carr (vocals, guitar), Joe Humpal (vocals, guitar), Brenton Neville (drums, vocals), John Freidel (keys,vocals) and Bonehart (bass, vocals). They’ve been compared to Modest Mouse, MGMT and Dismemberment Plan, yet a most recent review said “Take away the Modest Mouse overhang and they’re harder to pin down. As the name implies, they’re spacey, but not shoegaze spacey or Bowie spacey. Spacey like a group of Midwestern hillbillies who got ahold of a stack of Popular Science magazines and figured out how to build their own spaceship from abandoned grain silos, Case tractors parts and the cockpit from a hollowed-out ’73 Maverick. I can see them now sitting on the launchpad in their overalls, their hippie hair sticking out of their gold-painted football helmets. 10.9.8.7…” (Lazy-I, Omaha)