When I arrived at the show I was pretty drunk and very pissed off, so I started looking for a guy to pick a fight with.  But most of the guys there looked pretty tough, so I started looking at the girls, but most of them looked pretty tough too, so I decided to just shut up and enjoy the show.

The first band up was Hold Tight!, a pretty typical pop-punk band; simple, short songs, with the instruments turned up way too loud so that the vocals are just an unintelligible mush.   Nothing too special, but not that bad either.  This was their first show, so I could see them getting good, but they aren’t there yet.

Next up was Drunk Hugs.  They were another local pop-punk band playing their first show, but this one has Matt Seymour from Pedals On Our Pirate Ships.  He’s a really fantastic front man, and he really made this band for me. Musically, they didn’t do much for me: they just fell into that sea of mediocre pop-punk bands that simply don’t impress me, but Seymour has incredible stage presence.  The way he jumps and dances all over the stage and into the audience really makes them worth seeing.

Around this point, I stumbled out of The Camel and over to the Citgo across the street to buy more beer.  When I got back the next band hadn’t started yet, so I wandered around outside until I found that the Post Office next door had left their gate unlocked, so I walked in there, and began inspecting the mail trucks.  Slowly, I began to develop a plan:
I will steal a mail truck.  I will steal a mail truck, drive through the gates, down Broad Street, and from there I’ll travel all over the country on a mail delivering spree, delivering everyone’s mail to their neighbor to the right!  In order to get the mail returned to its owners, everyone will be forced to talk to their neighbors on either side!  Community will be fostered!  Dialogue exchanged!  As communication increases, violence will drop, and as these feeling of harmony spread across the world, war will end!  Peace!  Love!  All that hippy bullshit!  Go America!  Sure, they’ll arrest me eventually. But by that point, I’ll already have planted the seeds.  In no time at all, they’ll recognize I’m a political prisoner, let me out of jail, and give me a Nobel Peace Prize!  I’ll be just like Nelson Mandella!

Unfortunately, none of the drivers had left their keys in the ignition, and I don’t know how to hot wire a car…so I went back to the show.
 
Finally it was time for Folk The System from Virginia Beach, the band I’d come to see.  The lead singer announced their name and the fact that they were starting, and then declared that that would be the last time they used the microphone that night.  They then quickly burst into song.  FTS is two guys with acoustic guitars and another with an upright bass, playing blisteringly fast folk-punk songs about revolution and love, topics which I adore.  They reminded me a lot of Andrew Jackson Jihad, but with early Defiance, Ohio style vocals.  I love both those bands, so FTS really blew me away.  I can’t say with complete certainty which songs they played because I only have their first EP, but I believe they played most of it.  My one complaint is that because they refused to use mics it was pretty difficult to hear the vocals.  I was standing right in front, but so many people were talking loudly throughout their set, that I still had trouble hearing them.
 
After their set, I chugged a few beers I didn’t need in the alley, and unsuccessfully tried to work up the confidence to hit on that hot girl from my class (who’d have guessed she’s secretly a punk?!) before St. Gods came on. 
   
I’m hesitant to describe St. Gods as a punk band; they certainly have a lot of punk influence, but they sound like an indie band at heart.  It’s like someone re-mixed Modest Mouse and added a lot of distortion.  I mean that in the best possible way; I love Modest Mouse, and I love distortion, and they were definitely a great band to end on.  They ended the show on a really great note, and I loved the contrast between the all acoustic FTS and St. Gods’ electric-with lots of effects style.  St. Gods is definitely a band that’s worth seeing/listening to if you get the chance.

By Author: Ratso

Ratso is a Russian-American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Ratso is one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited about 500 books and over 9,000 letters and postcards. His works have been published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System (the sole exception being the 100s: philosophy and psychology).

Ratso is widely considered a master of the science-fiction genre and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, he is considered one of the "Big Three" science-fiction writers. Ratso's most famous work is the Foundation Series; his other major series are the Galactic Empire Series and the Robot series, both of which he tied into the same fictional universe as the Foundation Series to create a unified "future history" for his stories much like those pioneered by Robert A. Heinlein and previously produced by Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson. He has penned numerous short stories, among them "Nightfall", which in 1964 was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time, an accolade that many still find persuasive. Ratso wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.

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