It was a last minute decision to go to the Interrupters/Masked Intruder show. I was more interested in Masked Intruder than anything. The Interrupters’ new album, Fight the Good Fight, is good, but they haven’t been consistently churning out records as high in quality as Masked Intruder’s. Once Masked Intruder put out their new album, III, with its sharp wit and perfect harmonies, I knew I had to see them live.

The first band up was called Ratboy. They were a British band in the same vein as Rancid, which was of little surprise because nobody is as in the same vein as Rancid as The Interrupters themselves. I always struggle to find anything that interesting to say about first opening bands that I’ve never heard of before, and Ratboy was no exception. They were solid, but that was about the biggest compliment I could pay them.

Masked Intruder came on stage with a notable absence, as Blue, Green, Red…and Purple took the stage? Blue, in his thick gangster accent that can’t seem to decide if it’s from Brooklyn or Boston, explained that Yellow had been arrested and in the meantime they had a female Intruder, Intruder Purple, filling in. Whoever Intruder Purple may have been (Aimee Interrupter, perhaps?) she was a fine fill in and Yellow’s absence was hardly noticed. At the band’s merch table they had a tip jar that said “Free Yellow,” carrying the joke one step further.

My only real complaint about Masked Intruder was that they didn’t play enough songs off of their outstanding new album, focusing instead on older material. Punknews veteran, Greg Simpson, told me that you can tell from their live shows that Blue does a lot of harmonizing with himself on the albums, as the four of them can’t quite pull off the same harmonies live. Maybe it was the presence of Intruder Purple, but I didn’t notice any problem with the harmonies myself. With a woman filling in in the band, I was sure that Purple would take over Maura Weaver’s part on “Heart Shaped Guitar,” but to my surprise the band instead asked for a woman from the audience who knew the female part to the song to come up and sing the song with them. It’s a move I’ve seen many times before, and I find that it can often backfire, like the time I saw Green Day bring up audience members to sing “Longview” only to find that the audience members weren’t clear on which verse came first. But the audience member they pulled onstage knew the song perfectly and did a pitch perfect impression of Maura Weaver, making for an excellent rendition of the band’s most notorious song.

The Interrupters on the other hand…were kind of boring. Their set was split pretty evenly between their three albums (with a few covers thrown in, and a bay area covers medly) but it’s pretty much universally understood that their new album, Fight the Good Fight, is better than the other two put together, so why not focus on that album? I’m also used to a lead singer being the leader of the band, handling all the banter with the audience themselves, and I was looking forward to a little girl power leadership from Aimee Interrupter. To my surprise, guitarist Kevin Bivona really took the lead on the banter, with Aimee Interrupter staying fairly silent. Even their songs off the new album fell flat somehow, and in the end they paled in comparison to their opening act, Masked Intruder. But then again, Masked Intruder are hard to live up to.