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Coffeeshop Man

Damon Rexroad
The Coffee Banc, Broken Arrow, OK
January 22nd, 2005

I didn’t plan on seeing this concert- I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Damon Rexroad is an acoustic singer/songwriter the likes of which you would expect to find in a coffeeshop. He’s quite adequate as a guitarist, quite skilled as a melodist, but he just lacks a certain oomph that would make him more than just a coffeehouse singer.

He played for two hours with only a ten-minute break, but amazingly enough, he got better as it got later into the sets. His best moments came at the very tail end of his second set, when he played the bleary-eyed “Two Lovers” and the sing-along “The Edge”. There were more songs that I enjoyed, but he played a wide variety of songs and I wasn’t paying attention that closely during his first set.

Of that wide variety of music, his best moments came when he was at his mellowest, displaying solid vocal skill and consistently interesting guitar work. The main fault of his faster work was the lack of consistently interesting guitar work, but fortunately, he relied more on his mellow side.

I would recommend seeing Rexroad if you have the chance- of the bloated acoustic singer/songwriter genre, there’s definitely a lot of guys that stand way less of a chance than Rexroad does. If he pared his set down to a small number of his best songs, then I would highly recommend him, but until he does that, I can only say that I would recommend him.

-Stephen Carradini