By DAVE TIANEN
of the Journal Sentinel staff

Last Updated: April 26, 2001

Sometimes smaller is better.

Wednesday night's Vertical Horizon concert is a case in point. The show originally was to have been upstairs in the Eagles Ballroom but was moved downstairs into the more intimate Rave. In the Rave, the room was packed and the crowd was as electric a gathering as I've seen in the club in years, yelling, cheering and singing along at the drop of a guitar pick.

Of course, some of the credit for that probably should go to Vertical Horizon.

The group tends to get lumped in with Eastern jam bands like Phish and Dave Matthews. They are lacking in one critical jam band component, however: They don't jam. Nary a noodle. I'd put them much more in the pop-rock company of such outfits as Semisonic, Fastball and matchbox twenty.

They write simple, appealing melodies with choruses that seem to demand a singalong. At least that was the case on Wednesday, when almost anything from the band's hit album "Everything You Want" seemed to inspire a crowd chorale. They joined in the fray on the title track, on the encore "We Are," on "You're a God" and even on a surprise cover of U2's "Beautiful Day" - often, without any particular prompting from the band itself.

The notion of rock as fun has been kind of an unfashionable one ever since the days of grunge, but this was music as pure recreation, high-spirited, joyous and contagious.

If there's a downside to Vertical Horizon, it's that their lyrics tend to feel underwritten. A chorus like, "I get up sometimes/Like somebody else/Am I just wasting time/For somebody else" is catchy and easy to pick up but a mite undernourished in content terms.

Vertical Horizon started out as a duo with Keith Kane and Matt Scannell, but it's clearly Scannell's band now. He sings 80% of the leads and gets the best guitar solos. He also has an electric presence that certainly accounted for some of the energy in the room Wednesday night. The minor downside is that Scannell seems to have a difficult time surrendering the spotlight. When Kane would get an infrequent opportunity to sing, Scannell would bounce around the stage behind him diverting the crowd's attention.

One minor thing that usually wouldn't merit comment: This show had some of the best lighting effects I've seen in a concert in quite a while.

Opening was Five for Fighting, which is the professional banner for L.A. singer/songwriter John Ondrasik and his backup band. Ondrasik is a rootsy rocker, with a streak of Greenwich Village political awareness. In "Michael Jordan," he tackled the topic of what celebrity and hero worship do to people in modern America. That's not exactly standard fare in contemporary pop rock.

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