Fifteen minutes before Atlanta-based Microwave were set to open for Sorority Noise and You Blew It! at Cat’s Cradle’s Back Room on Monday night, the atmosphere in the compact venue, boasting a crowd of no more than fifty at the moment, felt strikingly casual.
Groups of fresh-faced fans huddled together, quietly talking with anxious anticipation about which band they were most excited to see, what song each band would play first and – even more importantly – what they would close with. Members of Sorority Noise and You Blew It! sat at a table on the patio and chatted nonchalantly. You Blew It! singer and guitarist Tanner Jones stood at the bar sipping a beer next to some of the younger patrons’ slightly nervous parents.
Cat’s Cradle’s alternate concert space is nothing if not comfortable — a small stage looks out over a room that holds the audience, all three bands’ merchandise tables and the bar, which sits under a balcony seating area. The intimate space is a perfect fit for bands like You Blew It!, Sorority Noise and Microwave; the lack of a physical barrier between the artists and the crowd befits the personal, heart-on-the-sleeve nature of the music played by these bands and their contemporaries.
“I wanted to talk about an inside joke, but I thought that would be boring. Nobody wants to hear that,” mused Sorority Noise singer and guitarist Cam Boucher before launching into “Dirty Ickes.” Seemingly going with his gut, Boucher remarked, “Charlie smoked a cig in the van. This song is called, ‘Your Graduation,’” a nod to fellow emo-revivalists Modern Baseball. Just as much community as concert, where everyone is in on the joke, chuckles from the audience turned to a singalong as soon as Boucher strummed the song’s opening chords.
Boucher and Sorority Noise took the stage after opening act Microwave warmed up the crowd. The Georgia quartet played six songs of their Southern-infused mix of hardcore, emo and punk from their latest release, “Stovall,” closing with the album’s title track. When asked by Microwave’s guitarist and singer Nathan Hardy how many people had heard of his band, the audience offered about a dozen hands; but by the time Hardy cooed, “A few more steps and we'd have made it to your bed / But sometimes a few more steps is hard to do” and Microwave left the stage, they could be certain that the audience knew who they were.
Sorority Noise ramped up the intensity the moment they took to the stage, opening with the soaring “Nolsey” from their newly released “Joy, Departed.” Accompanied solely by a somber guitar on the opener’s bare-bones bridge, Boucher softly sing-speaks, “I know you’ll never love me / I’ll pretend that you love me / You’ll always be the reason I stay clean” before a driving drum fill and heavily distorted guitars send the room into a frenzy of head-banging. Before the show, however, Boucher’s humble graciousness veiled his band’s tightly executed and wildly energetic stage presence.
“We just graduated college, and we’ve been wanting to do this for so long that it’s honestly just super exciting to be able to play,” Boucher said. “And the fact that people are interested in what we’re doing and are coming to the shows makes it that much cooler.”
Though Boucher and company may be content playing on any stage, their eight-song set – a mix of “Joy, Departed” and 2014’s “Forgettable” – suggested they are destined for bigger stages. From guitarist Adam Ackerman’s screeching solo on standout “Art School Wannabe” to the emphatic, resounding, “I stopped wishing I was dead!” on “Using,” everything about Sorority Noise feels sonically enormous.
Before starting “Using,” Boucher explained the inspiration for the track, speaking with disarming honesty about his own struggle with manic depression and drug abuse. “Today was a great day, but not every day is a good day,” remarked Boucher to a somber, attentive crowd. “Mental illness is real; it’s not something to joke about, and we should do more to help those who suffer from it.” The singer doesn’t come across as preachy; rather, his raw words resonate with the sympathetic crowd.
After Sorority Noise left the stage to the sound of thunderous applause, Orlando’s You Blew It! came in to close out the evening. Playing songs from across their discography, You Blew It! kept up the pace established by Sorority Noise, if not the intensity. The band maintained a conversational tone with the crowd, lamenting the negative consequences of exploiting an open bar, inviting the crowd to wish Jones a happy birthday and introducing the room of strangers to a friend from Orlando traveling with the band. The band is careful not to take themselves terribly seriously – a rarity amongst their emotionally-driven peers – railing against a culture of elitism in punk music on “Punker Than Thou.” At the conclusion of the track, guitarist Andy Anaya joked, “That song was under two minutes, who’s punk now?”
But don’t be distracted by the banter – You Blew It!’s rising popularity is not due to quips and one-liners; the band has talent in abundance, and packed quite the punch in barely more than ten songs. Still, Sorority Noise brought an energy to the stage that neither the act that came before nor the one that followed could replicate, despite worthy performances from each of the three bands.
Following this brief tour, the three bands will go their separate ways on larger, diverging fall tours, but will all return to North Carolina in November. Sorority Noise plays Greene Street in Greensboro with Knuckle Puck, Seaway and Head North on November 12; on the 21st, Microwave will open for Have Mercy, Transit, and Somos on the same stage. The following Monday, the 23rd, You Blew It! are set to open for The Wonder Years, Motion City Soundtrack and State Champs at Amos’ Southend in Charlotte.
The next time these bands come to North Carolina, they’ll grace considerably larger stages — and given their performances on Monday night, it was only a matter of time.
Disclaimer: Tickets provided to the writer for reviewing purposes. Neither The Daily Tar Heel nor the writer was compensated for this review.
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