For Fans Of: The Lillingtons, The Copyrights, The Methadones

Download This Now: "In the Basement," "So Cool"

It's a weird concept to me that a band like Teenage Bottlerocket exists in this day and age.

Don't get me wrong, they're a great band and I'm generally psyched on their existence. But it just boggles my mind that a band can sound like this after the year 2000.

They have been influenced so much by The Ramones that it's almost too obvious to talk about. All of their songs lie just between “radio friendly” and “underground punk,” similar to the punk rock sound in the early and mid-90s right before pop punk dawned on MTV.

Yet, their show at The Barbary on Oct. 22 is a perfect example of what punk has become. There were people with mohawks and weird hair colors, but there were also very normal looking people there who were as just of much a fan of the band as anyone else in the room.

The genre has become less and less about image, and more about substance.

The show itself was amazing. The four guys in Teenage Bottlerocket know how to make music that generates a huge response from the crowd. At no point did the energy (or the tempo for that matter) go down, and a large portion of the fans were towards the front of the stage, moshing like it was 1985.

The band opened their set with “Skate or Die,” the new single from this years They Came From the Shadows. During the set they went through most of their more popular songs, like “In The Basement,” “Welcome to the Nuthouse,” “Radio,” “Stupid Games,” “Rebound” and “Bigger than Kiss.”

Also on the bill that night was Nevada's Cobra Skulls and New York’s (and to some extent, Philadelphia's) Higher Giant.

Cobra Skulls have spent this entire tour with Teenage Bottlerocket and it's easy to see why. The band encapsulates a lot of the same straightforwardness that TBR has. They were different in the sense that their influences were really hard to pinpoint.

Here's an unedited list of every band Cobra Skulls reminded me of at some point: Searching for a Former Clarity-era Against Me, Social Distortion, the picked guitar work of early Johnny Cash, Propagandhi, Reinventing Axl Rose-era Against Me (this distinction is important) and what I assume a general Ska influence would sound like.

All of that being said, they were great. I really hope that the trio is a long running act; I think they could seriously be a cornerstone of modern punk in a few years.

The first opener, Higher Giant, featured members of Kid Dynamite, Lifetime, Grey Area, The Arsons, and Black Train Jack. If you are familiar with these bands than you can probably guess what they would sound like. If not, think The Bouncing Souls meets early Saves the Day.

This was their first show in a while, and they claimed to be working on new music; let's hope we see more of these semi-local guys.

Overall, it was a great night for punk-rock. I would recommend seeing any of these bands again