Most shows around town are about the now. For Boston rock band Zerobot, their upcoming record release party for new album Space Age Senior Prom straddles a fine line between looking back and racing forward.
On the nostalgia tip, the June 12 release party at David Square Theatre in Somerville has a prom theme, hoping to make sense of a night from many years ago that most of us would rather forget. It’s like entering a time capsule and having a do-over. If the coordinates in that time capsule are all fucked up, then it could jolt us into the future, a space-aged landscape where compact discs are truly obsolete (thank the heavens) and the dissemination of music and concert tickets are eco-friendly. We are closer to the future than the past.
“We make weird, fun, slightly crazy music,” says Zerobot guitarist Mick Greenwood. “We needed a title to match the feeling we get from playing it. Once we had the title, coming up with a party to live up to the title felt dauntingly ambitious — until we looked out across the Boston entertainment scene and realized all the pieces were there — we just needed to assemble them.”
The night also features sets from the Goddamn Draculas, Gozu, and Await Rescue, with Old School Game Show performing “a shortened version of their acclaimed interactive gameshow at intermission, written specifically for The Space Age Senior Prom .” Steve Katsos of the Steve Katsos Show will serve as the night’s MC.
In addition to the sci-fi prom theme, in which appropriate attire is requested, there will also be a Green Light N’ Go photo booth and the crowing of a King and Queen.
And here’s where it gets eco-friendly: The tickets are printed on card-shaped 2GB USB drives, which contains a limited-edition copy of the album, plus exclusive content from the other three bands on the bill.
“It’s time for musicians to come out and call CDs what they are …a dead format,” says Greenwood. “Once car companies and laptop companies stopped installing CD players in new models, the whole ‘listen to this on the way home!’ model of music sales went up in smoke.”
Adds drummer Stephen DeBenedictis: “Not only that, CDs are incredibly wasteful by today’s standards. There’s no replay value — most people go home and rip them to their iPod, if they listen to them at all. After one trip through a computer, it’s now a piece of garbage.”
Greenwood suggests that “by giving you a data stick that fits in your wallet, I’ve given you something convenient that you can use again and again.”
The first note in the process comes from Space Aged Senior Prom’s title track, a noisy post-punk-ish racket of a rock song that echoes the show’s goal of combining past and future elements. And you can listen and download “Space Age Senior Prom” from the Zerobot Bandcamp page via the embed below.
And it wouldn’t be a true Boston party without a poster illustration from Nicole Anguish of Daykamp Creative; scan the deets for full effect below.
