By Mary Williams
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
It was like a music video. The room was packed with teenagers,
all dancing energetically to the music and sometimes jumping up and
down in unison. It might have taken a struggle for members of the
audience to hold their ground with all the feet and elbows flying,
but it was so much fun no one seemed to mind.
The packed room was the West Hollywood House of Blues. The group
that elicited this kind of energy from the audience was Reel Big
Fish, the ska-punk band that has a strong ““ one might even
say fanatical ““ following, even though it hasn’t
released a new album since 1998’s “Why Do They Rock So
Hard?”
Sweaty audience members sang along to all the choruses and many
of the verses, their fists pumping in the air. The band, feeding
off this enthusiasm, put on a long and well-played set that
featured hits like “Sell Out” and “She Has a
Girlfriend Now,” alongside other fan favorites like
“Beer,” and a healthy dose of new material.
Another highlight for the crowd was a cover of A-Ha’s
“Take On Me,” the first notes of which encouraged
cheering from fans of Reel Big Fish’s covers of 1980s New
Wave songs.
The music was just as good, but more relaxed, than the album
versions. Singer Aaron Barrett would take breaks in the middle of
songs to talk to the other members and to the audience.
This was definitely Reel Big Fish’s crowd, which was bad
news for the two opening bands.
The first, Sugarcult, put on a solid but unexceptional
performance that got the moshers moshing but didn’t seem to
captivate the rest of the crowd.
The same can be said for Home Grown, the following band, who got
more applause but put on a worse show. The three members of the
band came out on stage in matching baggy white shirts, pants and
bandannas, with thick fake gold chains and large fake diamond
rings. Calling itself “Home Grizown,” the band got the
biggest laugh of its set in this first minute onstage.
Sadly, the entertainment value of its performance diminished
from that point. Like Blink-182, the members’ jokes were
juvenile, but differed from the other pop punk trio in that they
were even less funny, even more repetitive and were met with much
smaller crowd response.
Home Grown’s music was pop punk without being catchy, and
although it won over the crowd somewhat more than
Sugarcult’s, it’s unclear why.
The pop punkers’ intentional immaturity was shortly
replaced with Reel Big Fish’s experience and smooth-running
banter. Barrett said during the performance that his group was a
“professional music band,” and he wasn’t lying.
Instead of painfully bad jokes, Reel Big Fish kept the show
interesting both when the group was playing and when it
wasn’t.
Making fun of the rehearsed nature of much inter-song
conversation, Barrett and trumpeter and vocalist Scott Klopfenstein
would jokingly start to introduce different songs in exactly the
same way. Their sense of humor, while hardly overly clever, was a
relief after the numerous bad breath jokes that Home Grown was
making.
Reel Big Fish may have dropped out of the limelight a little in
the years since its last release, but at the House of Blues it
showed that it can still keep an audience entertained.