By Bryan Menegus, Staff Writer
Openers The Jealous Sound took the stage to shake the walls with their kinetic breed of emotional punk. Guitars wove in and out of each other at full tilt while drummer Adam Wade tried his best to beat his kit into dust, at one point shattering a drumstick, letting the shards fly into an audience grateful to have, in the literal sense, a part of the band. Frontman Blair Shehan, who looks like a crosspollination of John Malkovich and Lex Luthor, glared through the audience with a sleepless anxiety in his eyes that mirrored the band's songs, building tension through clean passages, then tearing into their instruments at full force once the thunder crack of distortion reared its head.
Between screams and guitar squeals they displayed a passion less evident in their studio recordings, and especially rare in opening bands. And the only thing more impressive than their fervor and musicianship was their sense of humility, stating on several occasions their gratitude towards the ticketholders and Sunny Day Real Estate alike, despite being veterans of the scene themselves, through both their own output, and their members' former bands Knapsack and Sunday's Best.
At 9:12, a time without stigma or significance, every paying customer was rewarded equally, as all four original members of Sunny Day Real Estate sidled on stage as if they had stumbled back into their hometown, looking both aged and timeless. Note by note they began their set with "Friday," stiffly shifting from verse to chorus, all of it much slower than ever before, and early on it was clear that they weren't meshing. The meticulous interplay and unexpected turns that made their songs famous were there, but they lacked care or cohesion. As they lazed into "Seven," "you'll taste it," the line that blared out of so many tape players over a decade ago was transformed from an enigmatic threat into a half-bored suggestion. Like an old Orson Wells, they appeared bloated, broken and past their prime, but still undeniably genius.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, as the sweat began to fly, Jeremy Enigk let his voice take on the high gravelly texture that colors the band's every recording. The audience was enveloped by the incorporeal nectar flowing from their Hiwatt amps, the drums flexed beneath the open wound of Enigk's lyrics, and as "Song About an Angel" reached its pointed climax of "sometimes you see right through me," the DeLorean revved. Without warning, they had taken three thousand people from Manhattan back to 1997, the willing guinea pigs of a musical science fair project, each one privy to a secret language that they shouted back with as much force as their bodies allowed. The experiment didn't end there, as Sunny Day chose to premier an entirely new song near the end of their set, which gave hopes to expectant fans of a new album, perhaps one which could rival their debut, "Diary" or their sophomore release "LP2," the two albums which their set was almost entirely drawnfrom.
After they ended their set with the cathartic "Sometimes," they almost immediately began their encore with fan-favorite "In Circles," and followed it with a rare B-side called "Spade." In an unexpected windfall, they concluded with "48", a disquietingly beautifully track buried near the end of "Diary," where Enigk's voice snaps between a daydreaming plea and a manic bloodcurdling wail. The music descended from the ether, shimmering above the yellow lamplight from either side of the stage. Strangely, the final two words of the song, "pitiful boy" were omitted, assumedly because the notes are now out of Enigk's range. As much as it failed to meet expectations, in a way it made sense.
(Photo courtesy of thickspecs.com)