-- Mike Joyce
A Taste of Chaos
Study the glut of bands working the punk-pop/punk-revival field, and it might seem that every kid who ever passed through the gates of the Warped Tour has gone on to form a group. That summer mega-package jaunt has proved so lucrative that organizer Kevin Lyman inaugurated a wintertime version this year, dubbed a Taste of Chaos. But the merchandise tables, video game stands and giveaway tents that filled the Patriot Center concourse Wednesday night belied the show's name, setting a scene far more docile than the sweaty summer sprawl of its big-brother tour.
Perhaps Lyman was counting on the musical acts to represent chaos. Such bands as Underoath, Static Lullaby, Senses Fail and especially aggressive metalheads Killswitch Engage may be on the more tumultuous end of the Warped spectrum, but by the time the show ended with headlining sets from My Chemical Romance and the Used, the throngs of teens left the Pat Center pretty tidy.
Trio di Clarone presented music for clarinet fans at the Library of Congress.
(Library Of Congress)
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MCR, a New Jersey quintet, actually favors sweet melodic upturns over chaos, though its 35-minute set did draw heavily on pounding punk-metal choruses. But songs like the sprightly "Cemetery Drive" and the sweeping ballad "The Ghost of You" suggested that they like their punk a little sugary.
The Used got an additional 15 minutes for its concluding set, much of which singer Bert McCracken consumed with asides and the requisite exhortations to the teeming general-admission floor area.
On disc, the Used (who somehow hail from Utah) have separated themselves from the punky hordes by adding strings and poetic abstraction, but they discarded those devices Wednesday. The tension-and-release choruses of songs like "I Caught Fire" and "Blue and Yellow" dominated, and though the Used remain one of the genre's more inventive bands, their Chaos set hardly showed it.
-- Patrick Foster
Wilco
Fresh from their double Grammy win, the members of Wilco took the stage Wednesday night at the 9:30 club to prove that the mainstream isn't such a bad place to be.
They were preaching to the converted, of course. A sold-out house welcomed Chicago's roots-rockers with the adulation they deserved, and they obliged with powerful music. It was a classier production than the one at the Staples Center in Los Angeles a couple weeks ago. Heck, they even had a slide show of Bollywood-hued butterflies and bees and flowers. Their sound, too resolute to be quite psychedelic, nevertheless had a trippy edge that made the pretty pictures redundant.
Though frontman Tweedy impishly described the lyrics of one song as "a bunch of sensitive crap that makes it sound real," he relied more on his soft, husky voice for pathos. Around him, the band was busy creating landscape after landscape: setting up silences to splash with bursts of guitars, building up a patina of strings and keyboards. Loud never sounded so good at the 9:30.
Openers Detholz! (that exclamation point is part of the name) didn't always sound good, but the group got the loud part right -- and scored with a raucous, polka-meets-grunge-and-blood-splatters version of "Ring of Fire" that was nothing if not original.
-- Pamela Murray Winters
