Preview: TWIABP, You Blew It! / The Union
By Marc Blanc, Contributor
The Union / Thursday, September 11, 2014
“Not sure where I’ll be next, maybe Texas or Athens, O-H,” David Bello confesses on his band’s internationally lauded album, Whenever, If Ever. The World Is A Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die has been everywhere in the last 12 months, capping AOTY lists and sieging Europe on a headlining tour. Gig life brings Connecticut’s prize nine-piece to Athens on Thursday to launch their debut North American headlining tour at The Union Bar & Grill.
Joining them is Florida’s electric You Blew It!, whose January LP Keep Doing What You’re Doing still graces the front page of Bandcamp’s “emo” tag. While sharing influences with many contemporaries, You Blew It! flexes an unusually frenetic sound and is on course to build an identity equally as colossal as the one TWIABP has built. Most recently, the band made news for the You Blue It EP, a tribute to Weezer’s classic Blue Album.
Support at The Union is coming from Philadelphia bands Marietta and The Hundred Acre Woods. Athens’ resident punks Ghost Stories are opening the night at 8:30 p.m.
Ghost Stories guitarist Eric Bishop had a particularly fruitful study abroad experience, as he secured his band’s spot on Thursday’s bill while in Ireland this summer. Bishop told ACRN, “My pal Mitch Rossiter and I were studying…he told me was booking The World Is…he asked if we wanted to play and I said, ‘Duh, of course.”’
With open-wound lyrics set to overdriven guitars, Rossiter’s thought process was clear in getting Ghost Stories on a concert heavily in the tradition of cathartic DIY punk shows. Additionally, the band has made waves with their recent Summer Break Tour, hitting for the first time Chicago and Gloucester, Mass. “Easily the best tour we’ve ever gone on,” Bishop said.
Rossiter is responsible for assembling the entire bill, Bishop said, including the outlier of the show: folk/indie/punk quartet The Hundred Acre Woods. Originally three suburban singers engaged in “Avett Brothers worship,” the guys of Hundred Acre were transformed by the fertile Philadelphia punk scene in college.
“Philadelphia is definitely an incubator for music,” the band said. “Our sound and attitude about music would be totally different without it. We played with a mess of punk and indie that more or less pushed us to get louder and louder.”
Marietta, on the other hand, is closer to the roots of emo, as the influence of legends like Braid and American Football is tangible on the group’s most recent record, 2013’s Summer Death. Spontaneous gang vocals and intricate guitar noodling are the fabric of the album, which was meant to carry a “disjointed, pieced-together sound,” according to drummer Andrew Weigel.
The Union will fill with both ends of the emo spectrum Thursday, with You Blew It!’s punk rock bravado shattering into TWIABP’s cosmic “maximalism.”
Tickets can only be purchased at the doors when they open at 8 p.m. Admission is $8 for those over 21, $10 for everyone else.
