The Bouncing Souls (photo: Kelsey Ayres)
Hours waiting in line outside the venue. Hours waiting in the upstairs bar at the venue. It was a trial; but there wasn’t a person in the room who didn’t know it would be worth it. Finally, people started to file down to the basement, where the crowd had maybe a foot of clearance between their heads and the ceiling. A stage so small it was virtually non-existent; and behind it a big movie theater-style marquee sign saying “Red Bull Presents: A Night with the Bouncing Souls.”
Hailing all the way from Seattle, Washington was opening band Tacocat. “Feminism” and “party” are not words people usually see in the same sentence or associate with each other. Tacocat, it would seem, was out to change that by any means necessary. They switched between topics like the magazine Cat Fancy, to having a urinary tract infection, women’s periods and street harassment. Even during the more serious songs though, they never lost their sense of fun; their live show was simultaneously upbeat and laidback.
The second band was relative locals, The Scandals. Their sound is very reminiscent of Sink or Swim-era the Gaslight Anthem, and what might have happened had they kept their rougher edge; the one that got them associated with punk in the first place. On any other night, The Scandals probably would have been the headliner of this show. From their first song, a circle pit got sparked, people crowd-surfed and microphones were grabbed away from band members. The chaos from the crowd and the passion from the band endured for their entire frenetic set; a nice warm-up for what was about to come.
The Bouncing Souls (photo: Kelsey Ayres)
Finally, after over half a day of waiting, it was what everyone came to see: The Bouncing Souls, a band that could easily sell out a venue three times this size, was coming to play a basement. You could feel the anticipation hanging over the room, an intensity like a lit fuse slowly traveling to an explosive. As soon as the Bouncing Souls started playing “Apartment 5F” the room felt 30 degrees hotter, as everyone pushed forward, and the circle pit opened up.
As the concert progressed it only got more riotous, through staples like “Sing Along Forever” and “Kate Is Great” to a cover of the classic pop tune “Do You Wanna Dance?” (that singer Greg Attonito attributed to The Ramones). As mentioned earlier, there was only about a foot of clearance between the audience members’ heads and the ceiling, and during the Souls’ set there was so much crowd-surfing that panels of the ceiling (eight, in total, as well as a wood beam) were kicked out by surfers and later destroyed in the pit.
This is perhaps the first time I’ve ever been to a show where the venue might need a construction crew in afterwards. A venue representative came up to the stage at one point after the destruction of the first six panels to alert people that if it continued they’d have to stop the show. The show continued on, however, with only a little more destruction (for good measure) and ended on a high note: the Souls playing “Here We Go.”
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