The Lawrence Arms/The Exit/The Break

live in New York City (2002)

Marcus

I was honestly anticapting this show quite a bit.. The Lawrence Arms is a band that I respect and enjoy alot, and I expected the show to be amazing….

The audience at the show was pretty dull.. Kids came with their parents (??) and older people went in just to get drunk.. which is kinda lame.. There was 0 moshing. The whole show consisted of people standing, staring and occasionally clapping.. Some humorous sights include seeing 13 year old teenie-bopper looking girls headbanging… An old parental woman who looked oddly enough like Sharon Osbourne.. and myself, being dropped on the first and only attempt at crowd surfing for the night.

Apparently there was another band that was supposed to play (The Saint Catherines, don't know if I spelt that correctly..) but either I missed them during my commute, or they didn't play…

The first band that played was The Break (or at least I think so..) and they were not that good in my opinion.. They were mildly decent, but they were overall not something I'd listen to. They had a cohesive sound, and they played well but the audience was pretty much dead which is something that really bothered me.. I mean, if I were in a band, and I was playing my ass off, I'd prefer to see the slightest bit of movement in the crowd..

Next up was The Exit.. They had an overall poppish sound and their songs sounded relatively the same to me (don't crucify me here..). The band really didn't exude much energy.. they pretty much stood around, played their stuff, and left. As I mentioned with the other band, the crowd was motionless.. Just the occasional "Woo!" and clapping.

Last up, was the band I anticapted greatly, The Lawrence Arms.. The proper word to sum up their set would be: Great. These guys were really great even though Brendan intially stated he and his bandmates had been drinking since 4PM and would probably sound like shit. Occasionally during their set, Brendan would throw his bass around wildly forcing it off of its strap.. He even smashed the tuning-thing into his forehead while playing.. As soon as the band finished the song he told the crowd that he was bleeding, and that he will continue to play so he could be hardcore like Danzig which was pretty funny. Brendan also mocked Dashboard Confessional during one of their songs. The band slowed the tempo and he began singing some lyrics from "Screaming Infidelities" but substituting lyrics and eventually saying that Dashboard makes music just to make money and fuck over fat girls.
I know I am not divulging too much info on their set, considering I didn't snag their torn up list but I did have the oppurtunity to request "Corpses Of Our Motivations" and the band dedicated the song to me then ripped into it. Their set seemed a bit too short in my opinion, considering they only played about 8-10 songs, those songs (at least from what I remember) being: "Quincentuple Your Money", "Asa Phelps is Dead", "the Corpses of Our Motivations", "the First Eviction Notice", "Chicago is Burning", "100 Resolutions" and sadly thats all I remember.. They played a well-balanced set of old and new stuff.. Their set was hindered by the fact that there was no crowd particaption at all (moshing, crowd surfing, singing along) but other than that, they were better than I had expected.

Over all, It was a pretty bland show with Larry Arms being the saving grace.. If you haven't listened to them, please do yourself a favor and check out their stuff.