October’s
Dance Card is coming thick and fast; after the previous night out with daughter
Jami seeing Beabadoobee in Bristol, here’s a trip up the Smoke for a boy’s punk
rock day and evening out! The punk rock in question here being of the new
millennial rather than the original 70’s variety, however, with an intriguing
triple bill topped by Scranton, PA’s The Menzingers. A band who I was
ironically late to the party with, fully jumping onboard with 2017’s “After The
Party” which saw an evolution from their punkier roots and into a more
expansive heartland blue collar rock recalling favourites Jimmy Eat World, The
Gaslight Anthem and The Hold Steady. I’d loved this and their subsequent 2019
effort “Hello Exile”, a couple of splendid Bristol SWX shows (gigs 1,069 and
1,174) also putting them firmly on my gig radar. Unfortunately, the closest
their first post-Covid UK tour took them to the ‘don was North London’s
Roundhouse (Menzingers vocalist Greg Barnett taking some stick from me for not
playing Bristol on this tour, at his Exchange solo gig earlier this year (gig
1,231)!), but hey, it’s on a Saturday, so… boy’s afternoon out in Camden,
right?
So
Logan and I hit the road at lunchtime, parking up at our booked Kentish Town
bolt-hole just after 3, following a difficult last half of the journey, no
doubt influenced by the train strikes, and necessitating a loo stop at the
busiest McDonalds ever on the busiest retail park ever, just off Western
Avenue! Much nosing around Camden Market and some fine Chinese street nosh
later, we hit the Roundhouse’s side bar just after 6, only to have our tix
scanned and bags checked in advance of the 7 pm doors. So we’re in… sorta…
eventually joined the snaking queue on the stairs at 7 and grabbed barrier
spots, house right, chatting to our neighbours before openers, Chicago’s
Sincere Engineer, on at 7.30. Their brand of urgent and insistent power chord
driven poppy punk, overlaid by angst-ridden drainpipe throated vocals from
vocalist Deanna Belos, was derivative but fun, and I particularly liked the
early “Nowhere Fast” and a later song, allegedly about depression but lyrically
centring around corndogs! Deanna tried to banish her obvious nerves by asking
the early audience if they had any questions, some wag down the front (ok, me…)
asking, “Cubs or White Sox?”, the vocalist immediately firing back, “Cubs!” The
Superchunk-like penultimate number about Lake Michigan, featuring an
accelerated ending, was my overall highlight of a pretty decent set.
We
kept our barrier place but spotted our friend and “live” favourite Ben Sydes
and his lovely lady Evey, so I popped over for a chat; they declined to join us
down the front, Evey citing inappropriate footwear (!), and, partway through
main support Joyce Manor’s set I figured, they may have made the right choice… JM’s
heavily bass-driven verses and shouty superfast emo choruses initiated a
serious mosh behind us, with a high number of crowdsurfers flooding over our
heads! Their generic emo/ pop punk numbers also often seemed to end before they
were ready, a breakneck “Heart Tattoo” (their 7th or 8th
number?) being the first one to sound fully formed! A slower outlier, the Jimmy
Eat World-like “Falling In Love Again” was an early highlight; the superfast
“Victoria” nicked its’ circular guitar riff from Green Day’s “Basketcase”; and
set closer “Leather Jacket” was a chunky and hooky swayalong. That aside, this superfast
20+ song (!) 40 minute set (a Ramones/ Dickies-like pace!) suffered for me from
a lack of variation, so felt like a relentless bombardment at times…
Everyone
took a collective breath then, and I figured, it’s not going to be that mad for
The Menzingers, right? They’re not that stridently “punk” any more, right?
Right? Wrong, as it happened… the lights darkened at 9.40 as The Ramones’ “Do
You Wanna Dance” roared over the P.A., The Menzingers’ entrance music ultimately
serving as an appropriate agenda setter for their performance. From the start,
they were fully up for delivering a fast and frantic, powerful and potent, raw
and ragged, fully “on it” punk rock set, opener “Good Things” kicking off an
even bigger mosh and re-initiating the deluge of crowdsurfers, encouraged in no
small part by co-vocalist Tom May, a red-faced whirligig of perpetual motion
throughout, Zebedee without the big fuck-off spring… After an early, anthemic
“America (You’re Freaking Me Out)” May exclaimed, “London, Holy Shit! It’s not
often we get to play at such a legendary venue!” his cohort in crime Greg
Barnett countering with, “we played [a venue in] Philadelphia to 2,600… I’ve
heard that thanks to some finagling of the numbers, there’s 2,601 in [The Roundhouse]
tonight!”
So,
it seemed that tonight was officially The Menzingers’ biggest ever headlining
gig; that being so, they played up to the occasion quite brilliantly. “Telling
Lies” was a pointed metaphor for trying to come of age in this fucked up moment
in time, “House On Fire” practically raised the roof with its massive
repetitive hook, and “Your Wild Years” was a personal favourite; I think there
was a little Baah-ston in everyone’s attitude tonight…! Oldie “The Obituaries”
saw Greg and Tom lead the “I will fuck this up” hook singalong, before a
frankly awesome, yearning “Anna” which was a breathless yet heartfelt set highlight.
Wow. An unplanned “Casey” and “In Remission” rounded off the set, an
incredulous Tom fulsomely praising the enthusiastic crowd. But that wasn’t it… first
encore “Lookers” nearly topped “Anna” for me, Greg holding his mic aloft and
conducting the crowd in the hushed opening lyric singalong, before Joe Godino’s
pounding drumbeat launched the song into hurtling, relentless life. “After The
Party”, their manifesto number, rounded off a superb performance, easily the
best I’ve seen this increasingly special rabble.
And
I learned a bit about my 15 year old son as well; despite the relentless
pounding and shoving from the moshpit behind us, he stayed strong and lasted
the course, singing along and giving as good as he got, particularly in fending
off one particular dickhead who tried to relieve us of our barrier spot, late
on. A just reward was Tom’s setlist, which we gratefully accepted before saying
farewell to Ben and Evey and ambling slowly back to the car, a Joyce
Manor-esque breakneck drive down the inky black M4 seeing us home just after 1.15
a.m. Battered and limb-weary the next day (me, not Logan!), although that may
also have been due to my Covid booster I’d gotten before hitting the road to
London. Nonetheless, this was just a superb showing from The Menzingers, capping
off another great boy’s punk rock outing!
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