James sent this to me for some editing back in early February. Unfortunately for James, the editing machine was out of service for a couple of months. Fortunately I was able to patchwork together a fix, which was a good idea since James actually still goes to shows and makes keen observations about bands, crowds, venues, and the various nuances that create memories out of what is essentially routine behavior for anyone who has been around punk and hardcore for a lengthy period of time. - Jordan

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I say pretty often elsewhere that Chicago gets short shaft on tours, on account of it being in the Midwest and not on the NYC to San Francisco by way of Texas circuit and… well, here’s three shows (in two weeks, in the cruel month of January!) to make me eat my words, with the first on being the almighty BANE in Rome. [Much, much more after the jump...]

At least in Rome, seeing BANE wasn’t really a new experience.

The venue (Init) looked like a warehouse that was done up for the occasion, with two parts: The part with the stage and the part with the bar. I’d forgotten how dark venues could be, but hey, black goes with everything. Outside of the venue was the real selling point. To the left was an old bridge (with almost gothic arches, through which traffic nestled through at 50+ kph) and to the right was an excellent view of part of the city and even a little hill to look at it from.

Sure, getting there was exciting, and the show started late, but once there, the tenor of the gig wasn’t meaningfully different. BANE in Rome was surprisingly like BANE everywhere else I’ve seen them. Kids and adults go off. There were less stage dives, but that was mostly due to the stage being very high (4-5 feet?) and precious little way to get up there.

Oh, BANE was great. But nobody’s surprised by that, right?

The differences were mostly local and basically nothing in tone: Frontman Aaron Bedard professed his love for Rome, about how he could get lost in the streets for a day and consider, very strongly, not coming back. There was a song (“Some Came Running?”) dedicated to the vocalist of TO KILL, the Roman straight-edge band, who had de-prioritized his band to serve on a Sea Shepherd boat. Members of Sea Shepherd were there and from what I remember, they looked uniformly glum.

ALPHA AND OMEGA as well as TRAPPED UNDER ICE got a significantly chillier reception, but that’s to be expected, as both were new in Europe, apparently. Anyway. When I saw the tour in Chicago (well, CRUEL HAND was on that gig), the reaction to TRAPPED UNDER ICE and ALPHA AND OMEGA, was, well, bigger by an order of magnitude. There was also a fight (we’re talking blood on the dancefloor) before TUI went on.

In Rome, there was none of that. There was maybe, three people getting into TUI’s set with a couple well-intentioned Romans headbanging for ALPHA AND OMEGA. Being the only one who understood what either band was saying was something that made me feel closer to the performers. The now shared experience of being expats, I think.

So! BANE, then taking a couple minutes to look out over a darkened Rome in November before heading to the other side of the city, was really fun. Man, all venues should have a million dollar, pardon, Euro view of the city they’re in within a stone’s throw of the door. Beautiful view, great band.

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THE COPYRIGHTS at Chicago’s Fireside Bowl, on the other hand, was a different experience. Sound of the band and venue location (Fullerton St. is not so picturesque) notwithstanding, the Fireside Bowl used to be a all-ages venue, with, let’s say character and perpetually broken toilets, where FUGAZI, DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN, ALKALINE TRIO, RISE AGAINST and PLANES MISTAKEN FOR STARS played. It stopped booking shows around 2005 for a number of reasons, most of them involving the proprietors realizing they could make more money as a bowling alley and not wanting to have to clean up the vomit of drunk teenagers. Old habits die hard though, and on December 31st, 2010, the Fireside hosted what might charitably be called a New Year’s Eve event, featuring THE COPYRIGHTS, CHEAP GIRLS and THE SIDEKICKS with LOVE AND SQUALOR opening.

I missed LOVE AND SQUALOR because I forgot where the Fireside was, and despite Punknews’ enthusiastic recommendation of Weight Of Air, it never clicked with me, so THE SIDEKICKS set was something I was non-plussed by. I perked up when I heard “Almost the Same”, since that was the one song I liked, but other than that, they sounded more or less like their record.

CHEAP GIRLS, uhhhh, were a three-piece and sounded a lot like SMOKING POPES, another band I’ve never actively liked, playing songs that sound like SUPERCHUNK, which yeah, I don’t like either. So: Wrong guy to tell you about the support groups. As the magic hour approached, the shinier, wood-lined Fireside Bowl positively buzzed and it wasn’t just the drinking.

THE COPYRIGHTS came on (at 11:35, if I recall correctly) with the singer saying something to the effect of: “Hi, we’re playing all songs we did last time because we’re lazy and didn’t practice!” The crowd, well-lubricated by a half-evening’s worth of steady drinking, loved it. From the very first song, and all the way up to the last one, “Shit’s Fucked”, the band could count on, at a minimum, 5 or 6 fans to hop the step up to the stage, get in the singer’s face and sing it back to him, with a handful stage dives to stir the pot every so often.

Okay. Pop-punk show at the Fireside, so far. What made the gig soar in my memory was the look of joy and bewilderment on the eyes of Adam during choruses he didn’t need to sing. Between songs, he talked, between sips of beer, about how he would drive up to Chicago to see some of his favorite gigs here when he was young and to be playing one of them, a New Year’s Eve celebration, was mindblowing. His obvious enthusiasm was infectious.

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Speaking of things blowing up, TRAP THEM fucking murdered when they came to Chicago. It was one of the free gigs Scion put on, so I got to Reggie’s Rock Club (Fairly ubiquitous design, dark, etc. Have you been to a rock club with a balcony? You’ve been to Reggie’s.) at 6:30, only to find that Scion was not fucking around with its 5 p.m. start time – I had already missed MAMMOTH GRINDER.

The last time I saw BLACK BREATH it was also with TRAP THEM, but the two bands were opening for VICTIMS. Here, BLACK BREATH had a little more time and fleshed out their heavy, metal a little bit more. Look, it’s longhairs playing thrash metal with solos that don’t get too carried away.

What piqued my interest was when introducing a song, the vocalist dedicated it to “the memory of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.” Look. I liked books long before I ever liked anything with a distortion pedal and to hear that one of the better metal bands going these days just dedicated a song to the guy who wrote Cthulhu warmed my heart and permanently marked the band as adorable in the ledger of my head.

With my surprisingly good tomato bisque from the rock club’s kitchen finished and the buzz of BLACK BREATH’s guitars silenced, there was nothing but waiting left. Small talk was made. Toes were tapped expectantly. Through the darkness, Reggie’s looked maybe two thirds full, but this was always a place meant for much larger groups. (The last band I saw here was DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN.) After what seemed like an hour, checking my phone a hundred times for the ghost of text messages to come, but was probably only ten minutes and twenty blinking screens, TRAP THEM turned on their amps and started a sneaky little intro to “Fucking Viva.” As soon as we figured out what it was, the attendees stormed the barrier.

And that’s as close as we got. The Reggie’s bouncers, having dealt with this heavy metal thing before, rolled into the edges of the mosh pit about then, an imposing reminder that this was a rock club (since 2008!, the banner outside the entrance vainly announced) that had Things To Protect From The Likes Of You.

That said, vocalist Ryan McKenney had enough energy for everyone in the building and then the next city block. Onstage, he aimed himself like misguided ordinance at the drumset, the barrier, the wedges, the guitarists (alongside TRAP THEM guitarist and primary composer Brian Izzi, played EVERY TIME I DIE’s Andy Williams on guitar) and anything that looked like not open space. McKenney ascribed it to the six cups of coffee and two Red Bulls he had drank that day, telling the crowd he wanted to see some shit.

The bouncers, doing their job, ensured requested shit was contained to people in the circle pit and didn’t fall on anyone from the front row, like airborne human projectiles, including the two kids in front of me who could not be older than 15. For the record? Also adorable.

The phrase was in the press materials for STARKWEATHER, but the only thing I could think of while watching TRAP THEM bark and howl out their uniformly excellent new tracks from Darker Handcraft was that, here, in front of my eyes now, was the apex predator of metal. It didn’t hurt the image that Ryan McKenney ended up perching on the barrier, with his hands on the heads of two concert-goers at one point in the evening.

TRAP THEM ended up playing two (I think?) encores, for a total of three more songs after titanic Seizures In Barren Praise closer “Mission Convincers”, all of it pre-Barren Praise material, which excited approximately ten persons in the crowd.

To give you an idea of how much I enjoyed TRAP THEM’s set: I’m back in Rome and I have an opportunity to see a shitload of friends in London in April, and the only scheduling conflict is TRAP THEM playing the same venue BANE did in November. I can’t bring myself to book plane tickets.

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THE MENZINGERS, playing at the Beat Kitchen six days later, had comparatively little trouble getting stagedives, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The lineup looked fantastic. A band I don’t remember, THE HOLY MESS who’s Dismount EP I enjoyed, ELWAY (formerly 10-4 ELANOR) and then THE MENZINGERS.

I made sure I showed up in time for THE HOLY MESS who were, all things considered, far too drunk to play well and largely disappointing. By the time they had three songs left, the heavily-hyped Philly quartet were starting to get going, but by then it was far too late.

A personal phone call interrupted ELWAY’s set. I took it outside the venue. I probably should have let it go to voicemail, as the two or three songs I did catch from the Denver quartet sounded like an up-and-coming Chicago punk band who seemed to understand pretty well just how much abrasion can go with melody.

But onto THE MENZINGERS. Holy shit. Chicago may not be the MENZINGERS hometown of Scranton, PA, but the crowd’s enthusiasm could have fooled me. There were lines of kids, 4 deep, in front of the stage wide enough to accommodate 11 or 12 persons, all fingerpointing along. Tom stagedived twice, once to “Sunday Morning”, if I remember correctly and once to their CLASH cover, which was the part of their set that got the least memorable response.

This tells you two things: 1) THE MENZINGERS have enough of their songs to stand on their own now and 2) oh hey look, Brendan Kelly of THE LAWRENCE ARMS interrupted the gig to make sure the crowd sung Toby Jeg’s wife a round of happy birthday. Where was I? Right. Most of the songs played were from their most recent records, 2009′s Hold On, Dodge and last year’s Chamberlain Waits. The hits and the fast songs were played, the wound-up, sprightly four-piece slowing down only for “Straight To Hell,” “Chamberlain Waits” and “Richard Coury”, a song on Abuse Of Information Technology I knew only as not “Alpha Kappa Fall Off A Balcony”.

(Side note: I got a little choked when up when I heard Richard Coury.)

By the time closer “Sunday Morning” (played like it had been run through with a million-volt battery) rolled around, I realized outside of “Alpha Kappa…”, I had heard every song I wanted to, played by a band honed by a good 13, 14 months of touring over the last year and a half to a very receptive crowd in a venue that allowed for intimacy, or in short: A really great show, played at a time when everybody’s spirit is high and energized.