Concert Review: Rise Against, Friday, November 21, at the Uptown Theater
Rise Against, with Thrice, Alkaline Trio, and the Gaslight Anthem
November 14, 2008
Uptown Theater
Better than: Getting all dressed up for some hipster party.
By CRYSTAL K. WIEBE
Thank the masses that Barack Obama won the presidential race. If he hadn’t, the Uptown Theater might have been a scarier place to be last Friday night, with disgruntled punk fans exorcising their political frustrations on the crowd. As it was, I still almost got hit in the face twice with a shoe while proletariat punks Rise Against performed. But it was a shoe tossed up – at least 20 times that night – for joy.
A recording of Obama’s voice played through the PA as the lights went down for the Chicago band, which headlined a four-band bill. People lifted their camera phones as the band took the stage in front of a giant curtain bearing only the word “RISE” in all capital letters. Each member of Rise Against was clad all in black, and frontman Tim McIlrath prowled the stage, sneering and pointing through his songs like a labor union president leading a rally.
Click on this photo of the wrathful McIlrath for a slide show of all the bands that played.
Although plenty of devil horns went up, Rise Against is the kind of band for which you should really raise a closed fist – for solidarity. At one point, McIlrath said, “It feels good to wake up and look across the country I live in and realize months from now, George Motherfucking Bush will not be our President.” And then the singer asked for those fists of solidarity and led the crowd in a numbing chant of “Rise, rise, rise!” By this point, the RISE curtain had already fallen to reveal an image of three guys in suits with nails through their necks.
The imagery went right along with the revolutionary tone of the band’s guitar-based anthems, which bemoan “fields of injustice” and have names like “State of the Union” or “Re-Education Through Labor.” Rise Against songs certainly have more meat than some of the music of their friends in Alkaline Trio, who played third on the bill. Rise Against dedicated the song “Swing Life Away” to Alkaline Trio.
Appropriately, it’s one of the few songs in which Rise Against gets a little emo: “I’ll show you mine, you show me yours first.” (And yet, even this tune includes references to minimum wage.) Don’t get me wrong – Alkaline Trio is a big, influential, pop-punk deal. The band plays its with heart – a heart with a toothy skull inside it. But all the broken heart rant songs and the band members’ crisp, mod suits came off a little weak sandwiched between the lean, mean message punk of Rise Against and the complex, harmonic rock of Thrice.
I expected Thrice’s set to be stellar, because friends who’d seen the same line-up in Los Angeles on Halloween said Thrice owned that show. That may have had something to do with the animatronic ape masks the band supposedly wore in LA. In KC, Thrice was just a T-shirt-and-jeans band pounding out harmonies and dabbling in electronic and hardcore territories. My favorite Thrice songs are more atmospheric – I dig everything on the “Water” segment of the four-disc concept album The Alchemy Index. Not much of those tracks made the cut, unfortunately, but the band closed its set with another goodie – “The Earth Will Shake,” which sounds like something that guys on a chain gang would sing as they labored.
But if they actually broke free of their chains, the same prisoners would totally be singing Rise Against songs.
Rise Against Setlist (as written on the official one given to me by the light man)
Drones
Give it All
State of the Union
Ready to Fall
Injection
Re-education
Chamber
Everchanging
Behind Closed Doors
Life Less Frightening!
Like the Angel
Collapse
Bricks
Halfway
Good Left Undone
Hero
Swing
Survive
Knife
Prayer
Critic’s Notebook
Personal bias: Punk bands have the right idea – write short, punchy songs; play a short, punchy set; and get the hell off stage.
Random detail: Complimenting a girl on her tattoo does not require touching it.
By the way: Meat is not green! This was among the messages that the counterculture present at the show wanted you to take in.
Also: Missed the Gaslight Anthem, but they'll be back on December 10 to play the Midland with Jack's Mannequin and motherfucking Eagles of Death Metal.
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