Because we base our worldview on recent interviews with Maynard James Keenan and the comments sections under reviews of Beyonce’s Coachella set, we accept the narrative that guitar music is performed and principally enjoyed by cranky Gen Xers and the dwindling remains of the Baby Boomer generation. The genre’s appreciators uniformly feel threatened by evolving cultural norms, and its craftsmen are deeply suspicious of advancing technology’s impact on media distribution. Today, guitar bands aren’t good for much ‘cept for gazing longingly at the past through rose-colored beer goggles, and shall soon — shaking their fists in clownish defiance all the while — sink into a sad, soggy, oblivion of grossness.
Oh shit, sorry, I just remembered Jeff Rosenstock’s show at The Paradise on Saturday night (April 21). That previous paragraph I just wrote is bullshit! Looks like I pulled a Cullen!
The NYC singer-songwriter/sweaty yelling man is very much living in, and of, the now, while arguably doing history better than the people who tried it the first time. Rosenstock’s latest pile of tunes, January 1’s POST-, succeeds as a Trump-era punk record to a degree Green Day couldn’t quite muster with American Idiot during the Bush years. Perhaps disquieting current events resonate with more urgency when you’re not living on a custom-made, moon-orbiting space station that you paid for by licensing “Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)” to literally every suburban high school graduation ceremony. Or maybe Rosenstock is just better at doing songs than 2004’s version of Green Day. Maybe both?!
Regardless of all that, POST-’s half-ironically titled anthem for a mass existential panic “USA” detonated the at-capacity Paradise with absolute sincerity. If, hypothetically, an individual felt a little claustrophobic standing shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow music lovers waiting at the back of the room for the gig to start, that individual would’ve felt a surprise swell of relief when, not quite three beats in, those same fellow music lovers dashed into a squash pit in front the stage, uncramming his personal bubble in a happy instant.
Saturday’s endeavor included nary a single Bomb The Music Industry! song, which is fine, ‘cos it did include the Craig Of The Creek theme, and maybe it’s better if Rosenstock doesn’t play BTMI! songs right this minute. It’s plausible a sizeable fraction of his current fanbase heard We Cool? and/or Worry. before they heard To Leave Or Die In Long Island and/or Goodbye Cool World!, assuming they’ve gotten around to listening to the latter two albums yet at all. More pertinently, Rosenstock’s claim-to-fame project existed in the big continuum of ska-punk bands with a heavy indebtedness to Operation Ivy, whereas Saturday’s crowd felt, ah… I don’t know the best way to phrase it.
Lemme put it this way: At one point I noticed a dude wearing a big Sex Bob-omb patch on a jacket lapel pocket. It’s not as if you’d absolutely neeeever ever see Scott Pilgrim merch at something like, let’s say, a Leftover Crack show, but it’d scan as unusual. Meanwhile, it felt like an apt representation of this particular room at this particular time. As for the apex of this particular room at this particular time, that would be the extended bridge portion of “You, In Weird Cities” in which Rosenstock jaunted up to the balcony to play the saxophone while the gathering below supplied supplemental “aaah, aaaah, aaaah, aaaah, aaaah”s for what felt like several minutes but certainly couldn’t have literally been that long. (Or was it?)
Openers Martha are what I used to assume Chumbawamba sounded like before “Tubthumping” — jubilant pop-punk with an anti-capitalist streak — until I found out Chumbawamba never actually sounded like that. Martha are a good version of pre-fame Chumbawamba, in other words. And they let us all know the secret U.K. slang term for Tinder, which we can’t publish here ‘cos it’s a secret. (Rhymes with “sinderly kinks,” tho.) Bad Moves are the kind of band people start when they really F’n liked Blink 182 in high school, and now it’s years later and they’re working on their doctoral thesis, but even though they’re too smart to be playing pop-punk, they really feel like doing that anyway.
Barry Thompson needs a nap and tweets @barelytomson. He took the photos in this post.
