Thursday night offered a reprieve from the sweltering heat — a blessing for anyone at the Black Cat with functioning olfactory bulbs — as two similar but distinct factions of punk fans converged: the young and crusty (literal) and the old and crusty (attitudinal).
Opening was Lemuria, whose straight-forward pop-punk adheres to a template mostly abandoned after the Asian Man and Lookout! Records bubble burst in the mid-’90s. Its latest album Pebble, sugary and sincere, shed the goofiness of its debut Get Better and its brief set was better for it. The band held its own in a cavernous environment, playing hard for its timely fans clustered at the front of the stage.
Banter be damned: New Jersey’s Screaming Females said next to nothing during its 40-minute set outside of its repeated allegiance to New Brunswick. With little fanfare, the band charged through the strongest material from its last two records Power Moves and Castle Talk. Much has been made of the incongruity of lead singer and guitarist Marissa Paternoster’s slight demeanor and outsized ability — gasp, girls can shred! — but the novelty would wear thin if its songs weren’t so powerful. LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy might have brought Daft Punk to the rock kids, but Screaming Females deserve credit for unleashing massive solos on the mall punks and having them eat it up.
Gainesville’s Against Me! are among the last of a dying breed; a band accused of selling out. In a musical environment where corporate synergy and brand sponsored tours are the norm, attacks on artists who sign to a major label is fairly anachronistic. AM!’s albatross stems from 2002’s Is Re-inventing Axl Rose, an album of leftist manifestos that ignited the hearts of squat dwellers everywhere. The songs are moody, nihilistically romantic and built for screaming; here —as always— the introduction to “Pints of Guinness Make You Strong” ignited instantaneous rapture. As is often the case, the band’s desire to move beyond its beginnings (and radical politics) has resulted in a lot of sore feelings, with every subsequent change seen as treasonous.
Last year the band released White Crosses, its second (and final) album for Sire Records. Both were produced by Butch Vig, a man who has made a lucrative career of whitewashing once-grimy rock bands. On 2007’s New Wave, the formula worked: tracks like “Up the Cuts” and “White People for Peace” emphasized the band’s bombastic predispositions with a smooth sheen. White Crosses however, collapses under the weight of its outsized ambition; it sounds like a bloated mess. Stripped of its fury and bogged down in studio gimmickry, the band seemingly vanished, its personality drained to the point of emaciation. The White Crosses songs snuck into the set — “High Pressure Low”, “I Was a Teenage Anarchist”, “White Crosses” — could charitably be described as sounding like Green Day, a polite way of saying bland and forgettable.
With its bright stage lights and mounted drum set, Against Me! presented as consummate professionals, nary skipping a beat before launching into its next song. This workmanship could be attributed to the band’s new drummer Jay, whose dad Max, knows a thing or two about the rock and roll routine. (It was in this spirit that singer Tom Gabel tried out his best “Dancing in the Dark” moves before launching into “Don’t Lose Touch”.) The band’s comprehensive and ferocious 20-plus song set managed to satisfy everyone: the kids walked away sweaty and smiling while the beards in the back found themselves armed with fresh complaints.
