Fete Music Hall in Providence, Rhode Island, was the setting as Bane and Hot Water Music brought their recent co-headlining tour to a close. It’s a no-frills, no barricade venue consisting of mostly black-painted brick and concrete, located in the gritty-even-for-Providence Olneyville section of town, in many ways the perfect setting for a pair of hardcore and melodic hardcore titans to wind down ehat was, by all accounts, an epic two-week run.
Kicking things off on this run as they did on each night of the tour was none other than Spaced. The upstart Buffalo five-piece experienced an obscenely untimely transmission-related meltdown on the tour’s opening night, but managed to scrape things together enough to bring their blistering, two-step heavy brand of hardcore to the masses. I can’t speak to the rest of the tour, but on this particular night, the band’s set was super well-received, as the constant ball of energy that is vocalist Lexi Reyngoudt constantly danced and paced the width of the stage and encouraged the early-arriving crowd to match the band’s intensity.
Hot Water Music occupied the middle slot on the three-band bill, but this was not a typical opening gig, as the band plowed through sixteen songs over the course of an hour. In a weird coincidence, I’m relatively certain that every time I’d seen the iteration of Hot Water Music that includes Chris Cresswell in the lineup, the set has started with either “Remedy” or “Trusty Chords,” so it was nice getting “Drag My Body” in the leadoff spot on this night. The set that followed did an admirable job of spanning the bulk of the genre-defining band’s catalog; recent tracks like “After The Impossible” and “Menace” have worked their way seemlessly into a set that also includes longtime favorites like “Choked And Separated” and “Rooftops” and “Free Radio Gainesville.” “I Was On A Mountain” and “Turn The Dial” were personal favorites, and closing the set with “Remedy” into “Trusty Chords” is a pretty epic way to bring things to a close.
The aforementioned Cresswell has served as a tremendous sparkplug for the longtime road dogs over the last eight years (editor’s note…seriously? It’s been eight years already?!?). I forget who referred to Jason Black and George Rebelo as Hot Water Music’s cheat code – Brian McTernan maybe? – but that remains a perfect way to explain their presence in the band and the scene. They’ve been operating as two sides of the same musical brain for decades at this point and remain as locked in a driving force as ever. And Chuck Ragan at stage right is…well…Chuck Ragan. He’s as inimitable as ever, and seems to have benefited the most from the spark that Cresswell has brought to the band, as he continues to push himself and his voice to what approaches transcendent levels.
Bane’s set was preceded by an unexpectedly long break as the band and venue tag-teamed to work through some frustrating sound and technical difficulties. But when they finally ripped into the opening notes of “Count Me Out,” they more than made up for lost time. There’s a bit of an emotional and musical floodgate that opens up when Bane plays a show. For a generation now, at least in the Northeast, the band have had the sort of label-eschewing crossover success that bands like Militarie Gun and Knocked Loose and obviously Turnstile have enjoyed in recent years. Bane is a force, a unifying staple that only seems to get more important as the years go by. There’s always a blurred line between band and crowd at a Bane show, as demonstrated by the constant barrage of multi-generational stage crashers and head-walkers that did not stop for the duration of the band’s eleven-song set (and sometimes didn’t stop even in the breakdowns between songs). “Can We Start Again” and “Wrong Planet” were particular crowd-pleasers, while “Swan Song” was a personal favorite. It seemed like the crowd could very much have kept going by the time the house lights came up after “Calling Hours.”
Check out a bunch more pictures from the evening’s festivities below!
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