In a market that is completely oversaturated with guys strumming guitars singing honestly about their love for please-insert-your-name-here, Ethan Miller is a wonderful, if not folkish, respite from the likes of Dave Matthews and John Mayer. Unlikely to be swarmed about by pre-pubescent groupies with homemade cookies (read: Jason Mraz standing outside Gosman earlier last month), Ethan Miller played to a full house at Chum's on Thursday night. The event was sponsored by the Radical Student Alliance (RSA) and featured a table of Do-It-Yourself pamphlets and literature offering an limitless number of causes to which Miller urged the audience members to attach themselves. In fact, Miller explained, his songs are all about communication. Not so much a marriage of rhetoric and art, they seemed to exist purely as a medium from which to soapbox his political agenda. That said, this is not necessarily a bad concept. Dylan's "The Hurricane" carried more political weight than normally expected for a top-40 single. However, chief among all differences between Dylan's success and Miller's failure lies in a simple song structure so tightly packed with a veritable alphabet soup of economic acronyms that, in a fit of dizziness, I was left waiting for a non-existent bridge. Where a criticism of John Mayer and Jason Mraz might render their catalog of music as given wholly to form without content, Ethan Miller typifies the opposite end of the spectrum - songs whose message almost entirely drowns out the medium.

Midway through a two-hour set dedicated to songs about economic trade agreements - I'm not joking, that is exactly how he introduced them - I immediately became caught off guard by the poignant guitar fills and finger-picking. These elements were sparse and left me utterly disappointed by an artist with promising ability and no sense of balance. Indeed, he had enough of a sense of humor to rework a song by Raffi and take jabs at the rich in "Song for the Unnamed Capitalist," yet his irony did not extend far enough to see himself: a Bates alumni with a neat complexion and well-manicured, indie-rock sideburns singing sincerely about the trials and tribulations of native Maine loggers. I was half-expecting to see his guitar adorned with the reminder that, "this instrument used to be a tree." His song about Pennsylvania coal miners pales in comparison to a similar theme, more masterfully evoked by Uncle Tupelo yet, with a beautiful voice and musical ability, his performance was not entirely without redeeming characteristics. That is, at least it would have been if only he hadn't devastated our ability to hear it with Riefenstahl-esque conceptions of "us" and "them." The concert was interesting enough for the sake of variety and it was better that he erred on the side of content in a market devoted solely to form. When done listening, please recycle this artist with all of your post-consumer materials.