Blog.WBRU

May the career of The Academy Is… be long and prosperous, and may they soon be given more of the mainstream attention they deserve. Call me biased towards a hometown hero, but last Wednesday’s show featuring this Chicago pop-punk band was the best concertgoing experience I’ve had in the Boston area to date, and it started the moment I walked in the door. High five to the Roxy for being classy and efficient - posted at the ticket area was an exact schedule of when all the bands for the night would be playing. I had never seen such a thing in my life. I was also shocked by how quickly they were planning to move: four bands in two hours and twenty-five minutes.This put me in a good mood, although I didn’t get to see exactly how this worked out. I got to the show near the end of We The Kings’ set and missed Carolina Liar and TAI labelmates Hey Monday entirely. From the few conclusions I could draw from “This Is Our Town” and “Check Yes Juliet”, WTK played the kind of mainstream pop-emo music I did not want to like, but found myself tapping my foot to anyway. The style was nothing original for their genre but very polished, and man-at-the-mic Travis Clark should, if his next album doesn’t receive the same acclaim, attempt to make money as a Tom DeLonge vocal impersonator. The banter between songs was also Blink-182-inspired, but this, unfortunately, fell flat on its face. They sounded clean as a whole, though, and were well-received by the audience.

It is always a good thing to know that if you are in the first few rows at a pop-punk show, especially one put on by Pete Wentz’s vanity label, you will feel old, as well as fear for your life. It is often not worth the price of a ticket to hear great music and then be slain by fangirls. I usually stay away from that nonsense, but ended up joining the pit this time, and it made the show. I felt a sort of bond with my sweaty teenage brethren - we all had high energy because of the music, and most of us with two X-chromosomes were drooling over William Beckett. Mmm…

Oh right, music. In all seriousness, I have a generally high opinion of TAI’s performance skills regardless of the situation, and they did not disappoint this time. They sound exactly like they do on their albums, but not in a boring way. There was nothing striking about the order in which they played their songs or the general progression of the show, which isn’t a bad thing. It just indicated, for me at least, that they were generally consistent and their musicianship and Beckett’s stage-dancing were equally infectious during all parts of the show.

It’s sort of difficult to get analytical on a concert that’s swallowing you up in a teeming mass of bodies as well as nostalgia. When you can’t see the show objectively from the outside, you turn to the set list, but even that was ideal. It was almost perfectly mathematically divided among the three albums. Almost Here fans must have been ecstatic - they got four songs. “Oh, they didn’t play ‘Attention’/'Down and Out’/whatever” was nothing a good post-show listening session in the car couldn’t fix. Santi fans may have been more disappointed to hear only the three main singles from their album of choice. And although I still have my doubts about the musical value of “His Girl Friday”, the part of the set list from Fast Times at Barrington High was generally well-chosen. We even got the debut of a new acoustic song they had written a few days prior about “being alone this time of year”, though God alone knows why Beckett would be alone any time of year. If he’s still looking for someone, I volunteer.

It’s not often that predominantly teen-oriented shows like this combine quality with energy, but The Academy Is…’s guitar-driven sound is mature beyond its years while still completely danceable. I was proud of them for delivering, as they always do, a great show, and I’ll be stalking their Myspace for as long as it takes for them to book another show in Boston.

1. Summer Hair = Forever Young
2. Slow Down
3. Neighbors
4. The Phrase That Pays
5. Rumored Nights
6. Black Mamba
7. His Girl Friday
8. Everything We Had
9. Classifieds
10. We’ve Got A Big Mess On Our Hands
11. About A Girl
Encore: unknown new song, After The Last Midtown Show

Photo by kfpandas on flickr