This story is featured in CityBeat’s Feb. 22 print issue.
With one of the most distinctive voices in pop music, Brad Roberts brings his band Crash Test Dummies to Cincinnati for a career retrospective show.
After a 17-year touring hiatus due to Roberts’ back problems and several members leaving the band, this veteran Canadian group reunited and began hitting the road again several years ago, despite not releasing a new record since 2010’s Oooh La La! But with a solid American fanbase, the three-time Grammy-nominated Dummies have embarked on an extensive Midwest concert road trip and will release their first single “Sacred Alphabet” this spring.
Debuting back in 1991 with their folk/rock gem The Ghosts That Haunt Me, the Winnipeg-based Dummies quickly established their quirky, popular sound: songwriter and lead singer Brad Roberts’ coal-deep baritone and a rollicking musical cast supporting him with acoustic piano, accordion, guitar, violin, and mandolin. They even covered the Replacements’ prescient “Androgynous” with a stirring homage.
But it was their second record, God Shuffled His Feet, that gave them a higher profile, eventually selling more than five million records. With the help of radio’s then-new alternative rock format, they scored a huge hit with “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm,” which shot to No. 4 on the Billboard chart.
Roberts’ resonant voice always stood out on radio amongst the more common tenors.
“My voice was stuck way down in this bass range, and I had to learn how to use that and use it effectively. And in the end, instead of it being a barrier, it was rather an avenue, because people find it refreshing instead of alienating,” music blog Ear of Newt reports Roberts as saying in a 1991 piece in The Georgia Straight.
Crash Test Dummies play Ludlow Garage at 8:30 p.m. on March 3. Doors open at 7 p.m. Info: ludlowgaragecincinnati.com.
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This article appears in Feb 8-21, 2023.