A friend of mine often wondered why there are none to very little indoor music festivals held in the colder months. Plenty of options for outdoor fests in the Spring to Fall period, but the infrastructure sits like a fallow field, waiting to be planted and harvested when the mercury means bundling up to get outside your home. Well, that changed this past weekend, at least in Boston.
Bowery Boston and Run For Cover Records joined forces to present Something In The Way, a diverse two-day musical extravaganza that showcased a range of genres from emo-folk to shoegaze. The main event was held at Bowery Boston’s flagship venue Roadrunner, while the original Bowery venue The Sinclair also hosted bills on Friday and Saturday.
Roadrunner was reconfigured a bit to accommodate the two stages, with the main stage remaining as is, while the second stage was set up where the sound and light desks are typically situated. This meant that those had to reside somewhere; the balcony option as used at Royale didn’t have enough real estate at Roadrunner so it was situated slightly awkwardly between the stages.
Day one kicked off with Dazy (long A please!), a one-man band who plumbed the crunchy sounds of mainstream 90’s alt-grunge with a pop edge. I half expected him to break into “All Star” occasionally. Enumclaw brought their own PacNW pronunciation challenges with them, melding melodic rock with a dash of emo, and culminating in an energetic crowd-jump by their bassist. Great Grandpa’s emo-folk sextet veered off course a bit with their cracked vocals and painterly compositions, while MSPAINT delivered Death Grips esque intensity, eschewing the typical electric guitar that is the foundation of most rock combos, but losing none of the power in the process.
The band that really lit Saturday’s fuse was Florida’s Gouge Away, transforming the packed crowd into a frenzy of moshing and stage diving. I wasn’t familiar with them but they will be on my radar now. Lead singer Christina Michelle didn’t wear the typical hardcore uniform, but she and her band delivered an updated hardcore sound that had the impact of a shotgun recoil. Any band that can take bits of Unwound while creating their own identity gets a gold star from me.
OVLOV’s set peaked with a wave of stage divers, and they would be a perfect match for a tour with Versus. Sweet Pill impressed with some Fripp-like
fretboard tapping and a dynamic stage presence via Zanya Youssef who was the clear center of attention. Connecticut’s Anxious hosted a wild stage invasion party, with bodies continually cartwheeling and pinballing all over the place. Gotta give some credit to Bowery Boston and Roadrunner security for staging this kind of event and letting the kids have fun without anyone getting hurt in the process.
Back in 2016, Run For Cover held the first Something In The Way event and had Modern Baseball as a headliner. They should have gotten an invite to join American Football and Soccer Mommy; file that under missed opportunity. American Football played their debut record in full, a record that they never managed to surpass, while Soccer Mommy played a smart brand of indie rock that when you squint hard enough, the lineage of Liz Phair and Blake Babies becomes clear. The guitar distortion at the end of “Your Dog” showed fangs fully bared. Pennsylvania’s Balance And Composure took closing honors, their brand of emo-rock clearly connecting to the hardcore fans draped over the barricade rail.
Day two saw a slightly more subdued crowd, though the blackened metal attack of Portrayal of Guilt managed to incite some half-hearted moshing. They Are Gutting A Body Of Water won the prize for most unwieldy band name and turned the back of the venue into a shoegaze stage dive heaven while Mini Trees offered self-described “sad dream pop.” Glare’s set suffered from a boomy mix for their contribution to the neo-shoegaze renaissance, a pretty paint-by-numbers presentation with only numbers 1, 2 and 3 available. Last-minute substitute Weakened Friends quipped that playing beats what they would have been doing otherwise, folding laundry, while Militarie Gun surprised with unexpectedly catchy hooks to match their high energy.
Two more hardcore bands tested the cable connections and PA stacks of the small stage; first up was One Step Closer who didn’t do much to stand out from the standard template, but it was one of Run For Cover’s label stars and hometown heroes Fiddlehead who put an emphatic stamp as closer on the second stage. I imagine that for kids under 20, this must have been what it was like for teenagers seeing Black Flag in 1982.
The main stage closed out in strong fashion first with Mannequin Pussy’s politically charged set, which started up with the fury meter pegged in the red. Then it slightly flagged towards the end via Missy Dabice’s long-winded diatribe before the band spun back up to their escape velocity. The entire bill to this point was pointedly targeted to the youth crowd, and I would hazard a guess that revenues of the coat check came close to matching the bar receipts.
The one band that was active well before most of the crowd was alive, Slowdive put on a masterclass of sonic and visual bliss. Sometimes Slowdive gentle meanders into the fuzzed out, dream-pop world but tonight the opening salvo of “Avalyn,” from their first EP. was instead a blueprint for an extremely loud and almost physical presentation. Deep into their reunion phase, they continue to really connect to the part of my brain that experiences pleasure, pain and the basic premise of being human. Matched with a thunderous and accurate sound system was unbelievably great; they veered strongly into Mogwai realms at times (and speaking of, still waiting for the rescheduled dates of that canceled Minor Victories tour from years back), the showers of aerosolized guitars and meteoric beats cathartic. This is how you do it, folks.
