Two beautiful attributes of festivals are immersion and discovery, At Flood City Music Festival ‘23, I discovered Kanika Moore, and was immersed. After a mindbending set with her own Doom Flamingo band on Friday evening, there was a a lot of anticipative chatter about an upcoming guest appearance with the Allmans tribute project Trouble No More.
By no means am I an Allman Brothers expert, but I bought the first two albums as a teen, and believe that the Fillmore live set is iconic. The second-gen Allman Betts team blew up Flood five or so years ago, and Band of Brothers does AB justice as well. Trouble No More is exciting in that it introduces a young new set of musicians to the cult – folks like Taz Niederauer. The execution, though, is a bit thin at this stage. The essential guitar interplays were missing, and it is really hard to channel the expected energy of dual drummers down to one, no matter how good the one guy is. The rotating vocal duties weren’t optimal. Visually, there was no charm: the players sometimes were looking at each other for cues, other times looking at the floor as if in class, and this was all accentuated by the zoom-ins on a large video screen.
Enter Kanika Moore about six songs in. The frontwoman presence made all of the difference. She filled the gaps, thickened the sound, gave us some dance & prance, and made the musicians look up and smile. If she has the time, KM should jump on the TNM tour in between Doom dates. Beyond that, I see a potential sideline as a solo artist. She’s really special.
She was very impressive. And fun!
Yes! Sorry for delay of response.