O-Town’s Inferior Songs Make for Dull Performance

Is it really so terrible that musical group O-Town, whose Palace performance Saturday closed a sold-out two-night run, started out as five guys thrown together after beating out scads of competitors on ABC’s staged, unscripted program “Making the Band”?

After all, back in the ‘60s, the Monkees were similarly manufactured, for the same reason: to capitalize on that era’s “boy band” craze. But that group won a legitimate place in pop history because, along with having its own songwriting skills, it was provided quality songs by other writers.

O-Town vocalists Jacob Underwood, Erik-Michael Estrada, Dan Miller, Trevor Penick and Ashley Parker Angel have scored a hit with the pumping, R&B-flavored; “Liquid Dreams,” proving that, while perhaps more sophisticated, today’s young audiences are far more easily satisfied.

The group even inadvertently underscored its inferior songs with an enthusiastic take on the O’Jays’ 1974 hit “For the Love of Money,” sung as if it were a personal manifesto.

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Crammed on stage with a five-piece band for nearly an hour, the lads danced and harmonized well, even soulfully at times. But they never generated the heat that superstars such as ‘N Sync did early on. Judging by the subdued reaction of Shannon, the girl serenaded during the hokey ballad “The Painter,” they weren’t even exciting up-close and personal.