It was a double-whammy night for the punkers of a certain age a week ago Thursday when a two-headed monster of beloved Midwestern-area bands – Smoking Popes and Off With Their Heads – brought their tour of full-album sets to the northeast for a stop in the metro Boston area. The tour marks the fifteenth anniversary of the release of the OWTH staple In Desolation and the thirtieth (?!?) of the Popes’ classic Born To Quit, and so it was a perfect time to double up on the back pain medication and head out into the monsoon that spent a full day bludgeoning the area for some punk rocking good fun on a week night.
Located in the metro Boston suburb of Somerville, the venue – Arts At The Armory – is essentially exactly what it sounds like: the old drill shed of a 122-year-old armory that was an active National Guard outpost through the 1970s and now serves as a unique multi-purpose arts and education space in the vibrant community just a few miles from the center of Boston. It’s the kind of place that, depending on the day of the week and the time of day, hosts farmers markets and poetry slams and a regular Joe Strummer-inspired ukulele slam and speed-dating for the polyamory-curious (yes, really). Oh, and punk shows! In some ways, the building’s history and its utilization as a repurposed space for creating art and community might be perfectly symbolic of the community of Somerville as a whole, tightly packed and tightly-knit and ever-changing, from old multicultural blue-collar urban factory center to newer multicultural hub of education and art and innovation. Maybe that’s a not-fully-formed think-piece for another time… In any event, it really is a great spot for a show. Sure, parking sucks (especially in the driving rain), but it’s a big open room with great sightlines and much-better-than-expected sound and lighting and a full video screen behind the stage. It was yours truly’s first time, and it certainly won’t be the last.
ANYWAY, the two-band bill meant that OWTH took the stage at the old punker-friendly time of 7:30pm (seriously!). The three-piece – the inimitable Ryan Young on guitars and vocals, Kevin Rotter on bass, and the return of longtime drummer Ryan Fischer on, well, on drums – ripped into “Jackie Lee” from 2006’s Hospitals to kick things off. The band chose to forgo the traditional band-logo artwork backdrop and instead utilized the video screen to advertise a pretty sweet deal on twin lobster rolls from D’Angelo for the duration of their set, albeit a deal from seven years ago. (Side note – Romaine lettuce doesn’t belong on a lobster roll, but I suppose if you’re in New England and you’ve opted to get your lobster rolls from D’Angelo, you’ve long since thrown caution to the wind.) After a few more crowd favorites, it was into the business at hand, celebrating In Desolation cover-to-cover. Ryan made a few comments about how In Desolation is the album nobody actually likes, which may have just been Young taking the piss as he is wont to do. In fact I hope it was him taking the piss, in no small part because In Desolation is probably my favorite OWTH record. Its raw emotion holds up extraordinarily well after a decade-and-a-half, “Just Breathe” and “Old Man” and obviously “Clear The Air” especially. Young has obviously had time and distance between the events that went into the album’s writing, but from a performance standpoint, the material is as haunting as ever and Young channels every bit of the same visceral reaction night in and night out. It’s a lesson in startling intensity, balanced with plenty of inter-song banter (and lobster rolls) to keep things from overdosing on bleakness.
Then, around about 8:30pm, it was time for the headliners to take the stage (accompanied by an actual Smoking Popes backdrop). The foursome – frontman Josh Caterer and longtime drummer Mike Felumlee accompanied by touring bandmates Reuben Baird on bass and Jack Sibilski on guitar at stage right and stage left respectively – ripped into “Golden Moment” to kick off their portion of the festivities. The lead single from their latest album, last month’s Lovely Things, is a perfect, uptempo shredder that sets a pitch-perfect tone for what’s to come. Then it was on to the matter at hand, Born To Quit start-to-finish. The band released an updated and recorded live-in-studio version of Born To Quit last year – here’s our interview with Josh about it – and it’s fair to say that both that version (which included lifelong Popes Matt and Eli Caterer on their traditional bass and guitar duties) and this version demonstrate that the album itself has legs. It’s songs of falling in and out of love (sometimes in back-to-back songs, a la “Mrs. You & Me” and “Just Broke Up”) performed with such sincerity and earnestness that they belie the sometimes juvenile nature of many of the similarly themed albums written by the Popes pop-punk scenemates of the early and mid 1990s.
When Caterer and I chatted about the new album a month or so ago, I made an off-hand comment about how for some of us for whom organized religion had fallen out of favor, we replaced that sort of connection and worship for lack of a better word with live music. I don’t necessarily mean to suggest that seeing the Smoking Popes live circa 2025 is a religious experience…but it’s not far off. The band is tight as a drum live, anchored by the lockstep connection between the rhythm section. The stretched out length of the headlining set (compared to the last time we shot the Popes, on their opening slot supporting Get Up Kids last year) gave Caterer and Sibilski the space to constantly take turns trading lead guitar licks, with Sibilski maintaining a sense of constant motion on his half of the stage, endlessly jumping, head-banging, and perfecting his Townshend-esque windmill. We’ve spoken before on these pages about Caterer’s ability to write songs of love and heartbreak in a way that still holds up over the decades without turning sappy (at best) or overly cringey (at worst). That’s certainly true on record, but it’s especially on display in a live setting whether on classics like “Need You Around” and “Megan” or on more recent jams like “Madison” and the post-Lovely Stuff anthem “Allegiance.” The Popes brought the evening to a close with a full-crowd singalong version of their 1997 classic “I Know You Love Me” that found Caterer shedding himself of his gorgeous sunburst Coronado II (which somehow sounds even better than it looks, which is a high bar) and singing with the crowd from the front of the stage. It felt perfect; a cathartic, revivalist moment acknowledging that we’re all in this fight together and that if we stay pulling in the same direction in the face of all the bullshit and focus on love and community, we just might be alright.
Flip through our IG galleries for more shots from the evening below!
