Bouncing Souls
8 out of 10 - Great. Good show.
Sunday, December 08, 2002
The Living Room, Santa Barbara, CA
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“I just don’t think that there has been any significant force or drive to the punk movement since the early nineties. There’s isolated bands here and there that still put out quality product, sure, but there’s a total lack of message and community necessary to call it a movement. And most of those groups are holdovers from an earlier time, anyway; the new face of ‘punk’ is Eve 6.” It’s an old argument. One that I have with my friend and radio co-host quite often. This quote is actually a paraphrase, and he might feel that it doesn’t get the intricacies of his view across. But I think it does express my own worries about the current state of the genre. A few Ramones have died, former members of the Dead Kennedys are embroiled in legal battles over profits, Bad Religion seems to be trying to play up to the Green Day generation by sacrificing edge for a polished studio sound, and bands like Blink 182 and Lit have corrupted the name “punk” by associating it with screaming thirteen-year-old schoolgirls and movies starring former cast members of Dawson’s Creek. Most of the old school bands have broken up or resorted to commercial pandering, while it seems that the newer groups of the last decade oftentimes stress the aggression and simple power-chord progressions of the genre much more heavily than they do its original message. Where is the anticommercialism? Where is3 disdain for mainstream politics and the sycophantic drivel of popular American culture?
This is what the BYO split series is all about. As a record label started by members of one of the early and great punk bands, Youth Brigade, BYO has produced albums from some of the best punk bands to ever grace a CD, tape, or record player. In 1999, BYO released the first of what would become a series of albums putting two significant punk groups together on one volume. According to the inside jacket of volume three, the concept “began with the idea of putting together a cohesive series of albums that would mark a place in time, conveying a spirit that has and always will, exist in the underground music society.” This volume featured the eminent middle children of punk, NOFX and Rancid, two bands who weren’t there for the beginning, but had already established themselves before punk rock started having its problems with unwanted consumer popularity.
There’s a sense of flow, then, in the fact that the newest volume showcases The Bouncing Souls and Anti-Flag, both bands being relative newcomers to the scene. The Bouncing Souls’ first album, “The Good the Bad and the Argyle,” was released in 1994, the same year that Green Day’s MTV smash success “Dookie” opened the floodgates for the sugar coated bastardization of punk rock and grunge that dominated the corporate radio waves for the better part of the last decade. According to Anti-Flag’s frontman, Justin Sane, they more or less got their start one year before the Souls with a radio gig in their hometown of Pittsburgh. Listen to the BYO split or to any of these groups’ individual albums, and you’ll hear plenty of antipop edge in the music and lots of progressive criticism of contemporary society in the lyrics. But, that is completely meaningless if the bands can’t play a show. Punk Rock has always been about a scene; a group of kids who feel like no one else understands them coming to watch kids just like them play music that no one else understands. A punk band isn’t a decent punk band if it can’t stir up a crowd of alienated youth.
So, imagine my excitement when I heard that The Bouncing Souls and Anti-Flag were going to be on tour for the BYO release and that, joy of joys, they would be performing right here in our own little Goleta. I’ll start by saying that, for reconnecting to the old punk roots, you would be hard pressed to find a better venue than The Living Room. It’s nothing more than a tiny rectangular room in the midst of a run down and abandoned shopping center. A fitting arena for a style of music jaded by the excess and artifice of modern Consumerism. Almost all of the officiating and business at the show appears to be run by kids, and that’s great too. No authority or older ways of though here; this is new.
Inside, though, is where you see that this is a real venue for punk. The shape of the room makes the acoustics horrible, the primarily linoleum structure doesn’t help that either, its dark, and its crowded. For a melodic and intricate indie rock band, this venue probably wouldn’t work. But it’s perfect for the intimate, visceral, and equalizing nature of punk. There’s hardly any delineation between performers and listeners, this is a communion of music. If you stand in the back, you can still make out everyone on stage’s face; if you’re up front, you’re in a seething crowd of people a few feet from the band. The performers are continually having to duck and dodge flying teenagers landing on stage to sing a few choruses at an open (more or less) mike and jump off. And this communal nature is what the music is ideally supposed to engender: the sense that we, together, are punks. We have been rejected by the mainstream but we, in turn, reject it. We have created something new and equal. As the lead singer of the opening act, The Code, put it “this is f**kin’ punk rock. No elevated stage. No separation between us and you, just the music.” Direct and colloquial, but that’s the whole idea, no?
And The Code didn’t disappoint my expectations that I was about to see a real show. The Philadelphia natives put a raw force and energy into their songs with a healthy mixture of ska guitar riffs thrown in to round out their feel. This musical cocktail seemed to draw influence from ska/punk forerunners Operation Ivy, and The Code confirmed it by playing a cover of a song by the former group. The particular choice, “Unity,” also reinforced the sense of community that I’ve been ranting about while drawing a connection to the group’s musical ancestor: “Unity, you’ve heard it all before / This time it’s not exclusive we want to stop a war.” The Code’s original songs, such as the more melodic “Never Forget” and empowering “Alert. Aware. Involved.” continued conveying a positive and accepting message through fevered ska/punk riffs.
I was soon pleasantly surprised to discover that the mood (though not necessarily the style) was only going to be built upon as the concert progressed. When Anti-Flag took the stage, I was not a frequent listener. I was aware of some of their work, and liked the lyrics I had caught, but they didn’t distinctly stand out in my mind. The BYO split had peaked my interest, and, after Anti-Flag left the stage, I was a fervent fan. Sane remembers that they started the band so they could “say a lot about the current state of the punk rock community and the world as a whole.” And the best thing about their performance was that they got that intent across. Musically, their songs have a frenzied pace combining knife sharp guitar lines with bass parts of well above average (for punk) complexity. After the amount of energy they stirred up, Sid Vicious must have been sneering down at us from whatever afterlife there is for heroin overdosed punk icons. The truly wonderful thing, though, was how their message of peace, tolerance, and community controlled the force of their music overall. Songs like “911 for Peace” and “The People United Will Never be Defeated” were introduced by fiery speeches criticizing many contemporary political events. They stressed that a violent tragedy does not require violent reciprocation and that understanding and commitment to change are the best ways to prevent violence. The tirades would usually end by assuring the crowd that they can change the world if they persevere. And when a subsequent song started, you would feel the common energy, the understanding that we were all a group of similar mind that can and will achieve great things.
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