Sayreville, NJ – 06 Dec 2024
The nostalgic romance of holiday magic
There’s something special about December shows at Starland Ballroom. It might be the finality of the year and everyone being ready to close out the year strong, it might be the heat of a pulsing crowd in glaring opposition to the winter chill outside, hell it could just be holiday magic… but it’s something and it’s palpable. Starland Ballroom has become my favorite venue for December shows over the last few years thanks to last year’s holiday blowout from Mayday Parade and recent reunion shows from Midtown, the alchemists at the club just amp things up for the last month of the year. Then there’s the big one,, maybe its the big 2… well actually its a 4 night extravaganza that spans Mulcahy’s on Long Island and Starland Ballroom, hosted by elder emo idols, Taking Back Sunday. Anyway, here I am, preparing for the first NJ night (third, if you count the two Mulcahy’s shows) and ready to see what sorcery is on its way.
Didn’t have to wait long for the magic to strike, as Tampa’s Hollyglen stepped onto the stage and immediately set the table for a top-tier show. My immediate thought upon their performance was, “This is a band that Victory Records would have loved to not pay twenty years ago.” It was a nostalgic throwback to the post-emo boom of the early aughts, the kind of sound that the crowd loved and was here to experience again (not surprising, once i learned Hollyglen frontman was Taking Back Sunday’s Adam Lazzarra’s brother Nathan. If not for the sciatica and pinched nerve, Hollyglen had the chops to bring me back in time to when I was 25 and the post-emo sound wasn’t yet called post-emo. It’s not often that an opener shows up, without fanfare or theatrics and tears grizzled punks and scenesters away from the overpriced IPAs at venue bars but Hollyglen left the bartenders with nothing to do as the crowd was caught up in the enchantment and began to push their way closer to get a look at what will likely be the next favorite act for many of us. In other words, it was perfection.
The festivities continued as Deanna Belos and Sincere Engineer took the stage. Last year’s Cheap Grills was one of my favorite records, continuing the trend of fantastic records from the Chicago outfit. That record was actually the reason I was here tonight rather than tomorrow when Sincere Engineer would not be gracing the stage. When the band took the stage, to the intro chords of the MASH theme song (“Suicide Is Painless”), the room echoed with applause as the quartet picked up their instruments and proceeded to play one great song after the next from each of their albums (plus an intentionally not so great rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”). The performance was so strong that the band’s 40 minute set seemed to flash by in seconds. Sincere Engineer is impossible not to fall in love. They are something really special and we are lucky to have them out here walking the tightrope between punk emotiveness and pop catchiness.
A slightly long break between Sincere Engineer and Taking Back Sunday allowed the anticipation to mount. You may be in a similar boat to me, having seen many voices from the internet saying how awful TBS is lately, how frontman Adam Lazzarra is too busy dancing and being a spectacle to sing every line as perfectly as he does on record. Fuck those people, they just don’t get it. Taking Back Sunday and Adam have always been eccentric and frenetic. The “mics are singing not swinging” line on the back of that rival band’s t-shirts wasn’t just word salad. The charismatic frontman has always been one for making things weird, and we are all better for experiencing it. Lazarra’s stage presence is part-revivalist preacher, part-70’s rock god, and he embraces the worship with a tongue in cheek fervor. While so many of his contemporaries want to get the crowd’s energy through their own resolution to perfection, Lazarra appears to know that we are going to have a good time if he is having fun up there. He’s up there for us by being up there for himself and his bandmates.
The scene vets blasted their way through an even mix of classics off the first three records while the crowd didn’t seem to take a single breather from the role as background singers. The set echoed through Starland as the band made the crowd swoon, performing new tracks like “S’Old” with breakout “Cute without the E (Cut From The Team),” and surprising the room with fan request “There’s No I In Team” before slamming through set closer “MakeDamnSure.” It was an absolutely phenomenal performance for the entire hour-plus the set lasted, and the crowd almost sounded hurt to see TBS exit the stage.
For a band that blew up 20 years ago, whose fans years ago traded their carabiners for car seats, this could have easily felt like old hat, but you could sense an energy in the line, at the bar, in the crowd, it was as if we all took a trip back in time and relived the great romance. Nostalgia won out, and for a bunch of 30-40 something weirdos who had once glommed onto the idea of saying sorry for someone else’s act of violence, this holiday gathering was cathartic and perfect and every other superlative that’s escaping my pen.
Bad Dad (occasionally called Ed) has been on the periphery of the punk and punk-adjacent scene for over twenty years. While many contributors to this site have musical experience and talent, Ed’s musical claim to fame comes from his time in arguably the most punk rock Blockbuster Video district in NJ where he worked alongside members of Blanks 77, Best Hit TV and Brian Fallon. He is more than just an awful father to his 2 daughters, he is also a dreadful husband, a subpar writer, a terrible dresser and has a severe deficiency in all things talent… but hey, at least he’s self-aware, amirite?
Check out the pathetic attempts at photography on his insta at https://www.instagram.com/bad_dad_photography/
