As per the request of the gentleman at the helm of one of my favorite blogs, I am expanding upon some thoughts I tweeted from the Fake Problems show on July 2 the year of our lord 2009 at Cambridge, MA's The Middle East. This will mostly be a review of the show with some special attention spent on the mongoloids behind me.
I went, as often I do due to my lack of punk rock friends, to this show alone. I sort of walked through the sparse crowd and decided to stand at the front corner of the stage.
The first band was a very young looking local band called Quixote. It took me a while to warm up to them. For the first couple of songs I was sort of fixated on the fact that the only one who looked like he was into it was the drummer. But the longer their set went on, the more I got into the groove of their music. My first thought was "Fake Problems on Valium." That turned out to be less than fair because with the exception of the guitarist and keyboard player, everyone was into it by the end. The songs seemed to be well written and were driven by danceable drum beats and a folkishly punk rest of the band. The guitarist, however, was distractingly not into it.
Next, another local band, Movers and Shakers took the stage. They played some seriously awesome sort of rootsy, sort of country, sort of punk rock and roll tunes. Their songs weren't super energetic, but the band was totally into it. A good point of comparison would be if Chuck Ragan sang for Lucero maybe. I didn't get too good a read on the other singer's voice. A little higher pitched, but not immediately placeable. The one drawback for these guys was that their keyboard was set up right in front of me and I couldn't see for shit.
Here's when the morons behind me made their presence known. There was a sort of crusty looking kid with dreds standing next to me during movers and shakers, and I have this sort of unfair visceral reaction against dreds. So there's one point against him from the get go. His friends show up, and start taking a whole hell of a lot of pictures. Like, way too many considering there isn't a band on stage. They're just taking pictures of each other in a dark club. One of the friends reached around hella far to give the dredded kid bunny ears in one of the pictures.
Then another two kids, recent transplants from Florida as I soon extrapolated, came over. "Hey, I'm about to take a picture of that kid," says the dredded kid's female friend from behind me. "Give him bunny ears."
"Sure, I don't give a FUCK!" shouts one of the Floridians in response.
At this point I try to shut off because I can tell a total retard-fest is about to start behind me, but here are a few delicious tidbits I picked up. Keep in mind, these are real things, real people said.
"Yeah me and this kid got kicked out of Orlando because we got too drunk."
"I'm like, 'yeah, fuck it! I'll smoke a blunt'"
"Yeah, he once smoked crack."
"I'm like, 'yeah, fuck it! I'll do meth.'"
It was soon after that gem of a fact came out that the gentleman who repeatedly made reference to the miniscule amount of fucks he gave had recently turned 21. And here's the kicker. This is the type of behavior that makes me wish I could carry a concealed weapon. The date of his birth was June 19. "Holy shit, that's my birthday too! We need to be friends now, if only birthday friends." UGH! I mean really, these were the types of people who were lifestyle punks which I, personally, think is kind of stupid, but whatever, beside the point. Anyway, if you're a lifestyle punk, you don't say the same sort of vapid shit that the high school cheerleaders say to each other in the cafeteria or else you're a hypocrite. Though this is punk rock, I guess that comes with the territory.
Anyway, back to the show. Kiss Kiss took a half an hour to set up, putting in my head the idea that I would possibly have to choose between missing the bus and missing Fake Problems. As a result, I didn't pay attention to them short of feeling a little bad when I could tell they saw that I was looking at them really angrily.
Fake Problems took the stage at pretty much exactly 12:15, roared through a just plain old amazing fucking set. Though Casey Lee was absent due to a family emergency, which eliminated the lead parts on songs. It affected my enjoyment, but only a little bit as the rest of the band really kicked up the energy level by a lot. They ended their set proper with "Heart BPM" off this year's It's Great to be Alive which is really a pretty fucking perfect song. They left stage for all of like 30 seconds, and played a real sweaty rendition of my favorite one song into the next of just about all time "Astronaut" into "Crest on the Chest." It was truly truly fucking awesome.
And I made my bus, so Kiss Kiss is forgiven.
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