Teenage Bottlerocket / Nothington / Masked Intruder

Item: Live in Philadelphia
Rating: 8
Author: Joe Pelone

Live in Philadelphia (2012)

Joe Pelone

You guys. Go see Teenage Bottlerocket. Arguably the best of the Ramones-core pop-punk bands around today, they put on a heck of a show at Philadelphia's the Barbary Fri., Aug. 24, with tour support from Red Scare buddies Nothington and Masked Intruder. They had a dude in a skull mask hold up signs (very Ramones), pretended their guitars were guns, had a pogo partyâ¦they straight up filled their set with good times and high fives.

Masked Intruder and Nothington were pretty good too. Masked Intruder has a hot-to-trot new record of pop-punk tunes in the vein of Ramones ân' Screeching Weasel, making them something of kindred spirits. And they're committed to the whole ski mask ex-con shtick too, speaking in stereotypical tough guy New Yorker accents in between three part harmonies. Can a band still be Ramones-core if they drop guitar solos into most of their songs? Masked Intruder doesn't believe in society's rules, man. That's why they went to jail.

If you don't know the words to a Nothington song, just start shouting "whoa." You will be right at least three-quarters of the time. Fast-paced Midwest punk is what gets the Org out of bed, and the now-filled Barbary boomed with voices singing along. While the band flubbed a few lines here and there, Nothington still served up a solid 30-minute set of throaty, passionate vox and fast, rocking tunes.

That said, TBR clearly killed it. They were the funniest. The loudest. The fastest. The best. Given their genre, it's easy to take this band for granted, but with the recent Freak Out!, TBR might prove to the best and most consistent Ramones-style pop-punk band sinceâ¦the Ramones, actually. While the band drew steadily from Fat Wreck releases Freak Out! and They Came From the Shadows, they did throw in some older tunes like "Radio," "Blood Bath at Burger King" and "In the Basement."

â¦or at least, they tried to. The band had to take a mulligan on playing "So Cool" after three aborted attempts. Same thing sadly happened to "Necrocomicon," one of the best of the new tunes. Still, TBR played these missteps off with humor and panache. The vibes in the room were so positive that nobody seemed to care too much about the band fucking up the majority of their encore. Besides, the regular set was such a tightly assembled party, with the band leaping from song to song with only the slightest of pauses, that everything after that was a bonus.