Wonder Girls
iHeartRadio Theater
Wednesday, September 6

Better than: Trying to figure out the exact location of the iHeartRadio theater. I've been there before; still got lost.

The iHeartRadio theater is a small space for pop—possibly too small. The 200-person capacity Tribeca venue hosts short, invite-only concerts; in one instance, I saw Scott Weiland there, articulating Christmas songs through a bewildering winter glare. There's no distance between performer and audience except in the slope of the stage, and so K-pop group the Wonder Girls on Wednesday night performed supermassive pop music from a distance that read as "punk"—that is, immediate, palpable. They executed choreography in the fullness of three dimensions. The members of the group laughed to themselves between dances, during verses, appearing ecstatic, leaflike. When one made a mistake—misnaming an album or incorrectly identifying the remaining number of songs, of which there seemed an unsure infinity ahead—the rest corrected and reassured them, like a body of water in displacement.

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2NE1
Prudential Center
Friday, August 17

Better than: Pretty much everything.

At the Prudential Center on Friday, after an hour and a half delay due to "vocal and technical difficulties," 2NE1 emerged from four separated, elevated platforms, wheeled around by shirtless dudes in mesh shirts. Later, they descended to the proper stage, necks decorated with massive, wavering chains that spelled 2NE1 between the four of them. This was the temper of the evening, their first concert in the U.S. on their first world tour: an assertion of dominance, perfectly mirrored to their music and choreography, four women braiding together aggressively, instructing you to fuck off.

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Texas is the Reason were and, recently, are a band. They formed in 1994 and released one self-titled EP and one full-length, Do You Know Who You Are?, on which they exemplified a kind of emo that was both anxious and circling—small, contained universes of songs that somehow managed to seem open and unresolved. Some of this quality can be traced to the playing of guitarist Norman Brannon, drifting and changeable chords that also acquire pattern. It's a resonant effect, as hard to pin down properly as the band's accumulated popularity from its only two releases. Texas is the Reason disbanded in 1997, reunited briefly for two shows at Irving Plaza in 2006, and have this year reunited for Revelation Records' 20th-anniversary shows. They play Irving Plaza on October 11, and in It Is Happening Again: A Texas Is The Reason Microfilm, which premieres below, announce a show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on October 10. SOTC interviewed Brannon about the reunion, the nature of genre-based scenes, and the band's still-growing audience.

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Brad Nelson

Warped Tour: Taking Back Sunday, New Found Glory, Every time I Die, Polar Bear Club, Fireworks, and others.
Nassau Coliseum
Saturday, July 21

Better than: Last year.

A few images:

• The weather was beautiful; this year there was wind. Sunlight gently cascaded onto the grounds and sometimes retreated behind the clouds, where it burned invisibly. Every Time I Die singer Keith Buckley paced swiftly across the Monster Energy stage. "There's no roof on this stage," he said. "There was a roof, but the truck hit an overpass and knocked it the fuck off. We are exposed to the elements and it's beautiful."
• The more introspective bands get audiences with sensitive tattoos. "At least we're still alive" was engraved along the length of one Polar Bear Club fan's collarbone.
• There was at least one tent in which a sponsored and mildly attended dubstep party transpired.
• One man dedicated a full minute to peeling a promotional sticker from his shoe.
• By 5 p.m., half of everyone carried a misshapen sunburn, pain in generous pink blossoms.
• The curious quantity of Magic: The Gathering cards littering the pavement, then the heavy and cynical shadow of the Magic truck just beyond the Kia Soul Stage.

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Everclear. (In case you didn't figure it out.)

Summerland Tour: Everclear, Sugar Ray, Gin Blossoms, Lit, Marcy Playground
Roseland Ballroom
Wednesday, July 18

Better than: Watching Empire Records on basic cable.

We make the "remember the '90s" joke around these parts a fair amount, but this week the alt-rock strain of that decade has been stuffing the air almost as much as the recent wave of hot-mildewed-towel humidity. Green Day, No Doubt, and the Afghan Whigs released new songs on Monday; Tuesday's relaunch of 101.9 WEMP as a station proudly branding itself as "alternative" brought with it a slew of recurrents that blanketed MTV and in-car cassette decks for the past 15 years, but have been absent from this area's airwaves for a minute. Among those golden oldies were the biggest hits by the five bands on the bill for the Summerland tour, a traveling carnival of nostalgia led by the daddy-issues-laden SoCal act Everclear and including Marcy Playground, Lit, the Gin Blossoms, and Sugar Ray.

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Daniel Silbert

fun. has blanketed America with the song "We Are Young," a strange, anthemic, Queen-nodding song that, via Glee and a Super Bowl commercial, is a bright symbol of modern rock being a force in pop. On the first fun. record Aim & Ignite and in his previous band, The Format, singer Nate Ruess made music in which punk-rock sensibilities could sit uncomfortably near wild Broadway asides. His lyrics seem uncommonly directed toward the personal, and themes surface—the phrase "cause a scene" appears in both The Format's "The First Single" and fun.'s "Take Your Time (Coming Home)," with the former calling for people to "cause a scene" and the latter declaring that "we're through with causing a scene." SOTC interviewed Ruess about his lyrics and his music industry experiences.

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Jesse Riggins (via Facebook)

Last night, the relatively fresh, relatively local pop-punk band Swearin' opened for Iron Chic at Death by Audio. The setup was usual—two guitars, bass, drums—but the volume of the two guitars was such that it overwhelmed everything, the vocals even, so there were just chords and powerful shifting. Somewhere underneath, singer and guitarist Allison Crutchfield fought against it, stonily, brassily singing, "I hope you like Kenosha so much you stay there."

Kenosha is a bustling Wisconsin college town as well as an adequate nowhere in which to dump someone who has been deemed inconsiderate. There's this peculiarity of detail to most Swearin' songs, where a few spare images—"Kenosha" launches immediately from "Place me/ precariously/ Skinned knee/ I want to leave"—will form a kind of inexhaustible tableau of being wronged. This is when words surface curiously as half-poetry, half-argument. Punk rock serves this kind of curved perspective; as it travels, it gathers up furies.

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Rorschach.

Rorschach w/Converge, Indecision, Xaddax
(le) Poisson Rouge
Saturday, May 26

Better than: Anything you would rightly expect of a hardcore show at (le) Poisson Rouge

Cleared of tables and chairs, (le) Poisson Rouge restores some of its character as a basement, ideal staging for a hardcore show even as it remains a basement with bottle service. Saturday, cardinal-metalcore band Converge supported the even more cardinal Rorschach in the red-edged subterranean space and for a moment one's knowledge of the venue's fundamental weirdness slipped away.

"We wouldn't be here without Rorschach," Converge singer Jacob Bannon said, pacing around the stage with light determination. In the early '90s Rorscach were among the first bands to mix metal and hardcore in a not-Slayer way; the songs are terse and baldly-arranged but there's a heaving, doomy swing to it all. People heard this and perceived a new path opening up to them.

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Mid-'90s emo institution The Promise Ring announced last year that they'd reunite to play a few scattered shows throughout 2012. The band, in its early days, combined the noisy and particulate ideas of guitarist/singer Davey von Bohlen's previous band Cap'n Jazz with more traditional punk constructions. There's a kind of insistent, environmental appeal to the style, demonstrated in songs like "Everywhere in Denver" and "Why Did We Ever Meet?", which feel like an onrush of water.

Before their breakup in 2002, the band released Wood/Water, an album on which they became suddenly expansive and observant, to the perceivable confusion of fans. The band will perform at the Bamboozle on Saturday and at Irving Plaza on Sunday, and The Village Voice spoke with drummer Dan Didier about the nature of the reunion as well as how Wood/Water has evolved in the estimation of Promise Ring fans.

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Say Anything
Best Buy Theater
Friday, April 13

Better than: So what say you/ and all your friends/ step up to my friends/ in the alley tonight/ yeah.

On Friday night, Say Anything ended their encore with two songs of the same name: "Admit It." The first, from Say Anything's 2004 record ... is a Real Boy, and the second, from their 2012 record Anarchy, My Dear, both contain the sort of wild, mean rhetoric that seeks to character-assassinate the "hipster," or the idea of a hipster, or just someone whose outward projections seem calculated in the cynical. It's practically spoken-word: "Despite your pseudo-bohemian appearance and vaguely leftist doctrine of beliefs/ you know nothing about art or sex that you couldn't read in any trendy New York underground fashion magazine." All of the details and signifiers singer Max Bemis gibbers through ultimately form a kind of cipher, a thing that only reflexively defines Bemis. It doesn't matter if there's a demonstrable person at the end of the song. It's more an ethos than total enmity. The final verse, where Bemis turns the mirror on himself, locks the song into perspective, newly full of a kind of twisted pathos: "Well, let me tell you this/ I am shamelessly self-involved/ I spend hours in front of the mirror making my hair elegantly disheveled."

The new "Admit It," which is actually titled "Admit it Again," seems curiously oriented toward critics, and there is no reflective verse, no object in a mirror, just mean facelessness. Here Bemis is the cipher, yelling needlessly at people who will probably never listen to the song. (One line seems transparently aimed toward, um, a music-reviewing website: "Defining your own self-worth by the opinion of a stupid website with Satan as its figurehead.") It plods musically; where the first "Admit It" nearly rushes by you, the new one dully paces around. Arranged together, in concert, you could witness a band's slow decline in a kind of hyperspeed, time unfurling. Besides, early in the newer song, Bemis sings, "Don't want to hear about how the latest Rihanna single is a postmodern masterpiece," which I choose to take personally.

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