Not just for teenyboppers
Drive-Thru Records is a smart label. It knows that if someone likes one Drive-Thru band, chances are that person will like the label's other bands. This fall, it has gotten even smarter, sending five of its bands out on tour together to conquer the nation on the Drive-Thru Invasion Tour. On Thursday night at the 9:30 club, the bands played to a sold-out house.
Pop-punk, a genre inclusive of the majority of the Drive-Thru bands, is often thought to be all about sugar-coated songs with lyrics about ex-girlfriends and heartbreaks. While this may be mostly true, the performances on Thursday night were anything but sugar-coated. The opening band, The Early November, played such an energetic set that one of the members of Home Grown later admitted to having goose bumps during the last three songs. The set climaxed with bassist Sergio Anello leaping off a 12-foot balcony while the other members of the band went wild.
Senses Fail followed this set with an even crazier performance. Lead singer Buddy Nielsen's stage presence rivaled that of Iggy Pop's early years, throwing himself all over stage while howling into the microphone. The rest of the band was no less vigorous in its performance. Allister and Home Grown performed the next two sets and kept the audience moving for the show's culmination: The Starting Line's headlining set.
Unfortunately, The Starting Line played the worst. While the performance wasn't necessarily bad, and lead singer and bassist Ken Vasoli tossed himself all over the stage, the set seemed a lot more forced than those of the other bands. The first two bands, both relatively new to the music scene, didn't appear to care how cool they looked on stage, but The Starting Line did.
The show's momentum was fluid, with only 10-minute set changes and shorter sets for the first four bands.
The bands gained additional respect from fans for chilling outside the club after the show and talking to (or, in the case of Dan Hammond, guitarist for Home Grown, running up to and hugging) those standing around.
Many leave pop-punk to teenage girls because they don't consider it "good" or "cool." Music elitists can ridicule this music all they want, but these bands should be given credit for the energy and insanity they bring to the stage during a live show.
The thrills and spills of being a pop-punk star
"I have sex, like, every night," Sergio Anello, bassist for The Early November, who is currently part of the Drive-Thru Invasion Tour, said in a rather sheepish voice. "I think everybody meets girls on tour, it's just whether everybody takes advantage of the fact that they're horny girls ... the majority of the time you're minding your own business and then they bring themselves to you ... and a boy at 19 can only hold out minding his own business for so long."
While Anello helps perpetuate the stereotype that bands on tour get laid every night, the rest of Early November said that he is an anomaly. The band also made it clear that while being on tour is fun, it is not quite as glamorous as the public may imagine.
"We shower at venues," explained guitarist Joe Marro. "Some venues have showers, but some days it's like 'Cool, no shower,' or 'Cool, a shower with a roach in it.'"
Besides being perpetually dirty, the band also sleeps in a bus with another band, Home Grown, and its crew. Early November, however, didn't really seem to mind that more than 12 people share a bus.
"This one's pretty cush," Anello said. "If you go over there and check out [Allister and Senses Fail's] bus, there's 18 people on it and it's a piece of crap ... we call it the slave ship."
But none of these inconveniences mean that the band isn't having a great time on tour.
"Tour's awesome," Anello explained. "This is our first U.S. tour on a bus, so it's just like play, and basically hang out for a lot of hours." And by hang out, he means spend time with the other four bands on tour, all of which share the same record label, and many of which have toured together before.
"This tour's really fun because everybody's commuting together," drummer Jeff Kummer said. "This tour everybody's together all the time, so we're hanging out with Senses Fail until, like, five in the morning." The Early November, whose name, according to Anello, is a euphemism for pre-mature ejaculation, gets pretty crazy on stage and probably leaves every audience member wondering when one of the members will finally manage to break something.
"For a while me and Serge were real hurt for like, two weeks," Marro said excitedly. "We both jumped off an 11-foot high PA stack in Arizona ... we cracked our heels pretty bad. The next show we had to play standing still and we had to apologize to the crowd." Anello added, "I landed on my guitar so hard that it split up the middle and cracked."
On Thursday night at the 9:30 club, Anello climbed onto a 12-foot balcony during the set and jumped off, immediately throwing himself over the barricade into the crowd, barely landing.
"Apparently I landed tonight and hit my head; they said I jumped and bit my tongue too. It's all in a day's work." Anello said nonchalantly.
The Early November will release its debut LP "The Room's Too Cold" on Oct. 7. The band will also be headlining a tour immediately following the end of the Drive-Thru tour with Count the Stars, Copeland and Hidden in Plain View. For more information on the band or to pre-order its album, visit www.drivethrurecords.com.
