Review: Third Eye Blind, Dashboard Confessional, Night Terrors of 1927 July 11, 2015 at The Joint

There’s no clearer sign of one’s own mortality than the music of your youth becoming the source of a nostalgia tour. Even more so when you walk into the venue to find that it is seated. It’s no longer a real worry that we’re going to get a meaningful pit going during “Screaming Infidelities,”  it’s more that they’d like to discourage us from hurting our hips while trying.

Like every teenager in the early aughts, I’d have submitted for the record that there was no better catharsis than screaming along with Dashboard Confessional’s lovelorn lyrics. As guitars were checked by strumming the intro to “Ice Ice Baby” (or was it “Under Pressure?” You can never tell. There’s just that itty bitty change there) – I got that old familiar feeling of Dashboard shows gone by. Frontman Chris Carrabba has a gift for making these large, 4,000 seat venues feel like intimate coffee shops, cultivating a comfortable, communal feeling that’s almost unparalleled. And as the man himself took the stage with his band, screams shook the room, and a smile spread across my face knowing that I’d have some new friends to sing along to my favorite songs with.

It’s clear that Dashboard is taking advantage of the larger rooms they get to play on this tour with Third Eye Blind, because Chris is shredding, crawling around the stage, jumping off the drums, and pretty much just incapable of standing still while playing personal favorites like a stripped down “Screaming Infidelities,” poppy “Saints and Sailors” and rousing “Again I Go Unnoticed” all from Swiss Army Romance/The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most. The rest of the band was incredible as well, with special attention going to bass player Scott Schoenbeck, whose garb made him look a whole lot like Andrew WK, if AWK was also wearing a menacing leather vest.

2006’s Dusk and Summer was well represented with “Stolen” (featuring balloons tossed into the crowd from the soundboard) and “Vindicated,” while Carrabba’s new, Mumford and Sons-esq band Twin Forks was on display with a “cover” of “Back to You.” Carrabba’s rambunctious cousin (Twin Forks’ Shawn Zorn) was brought out on stage to make it that much more authentic and I must admit – I enjoyed the song much more live than on record.

I was a little disappointed that no songs were played from 2007’s incredibly underrated The Shade of Poison Trees, but those are small qualms and the huge smile on Carrabba’s face was contagious as they ended their set exactly as you’d expect – with “Hands Down.” Everyone in the audience happily lost their voices and minds to the line “My hopes are so high that your kiss might kill me. So won’t you kill me? So I die happy.”

Dashboard’s partners in crime this summer, Third Eye Blind, made a dramatic entrance only a few minutes after the former wrapped up their set, with frontman Stephan Jenkins silhouetted, standing on a pedestal, microphone dangling above his head from the rafters for “Graduate.”

Early on, Jenkins promised that he would bleed out on the stage if it was necessary to get the crowd going. Thankfully for him, it wasn’t. People were out of their chairs from the first note, eager to shout “Can I graduate,” “I wish you would step back from that ledge my friend” and, of course “I want something else, to get me through this semi-charmed kinda life.”

Third Eye Blind is a consistently solid, catchy band and by the screams of the crowd, I think it’s safe to say they haven’t dropped in popularity much since their heyday. It was especially impressive that one of the songs that received the biggest crowd reaction, “Motorcycle Drive By,” was never even released as a single. Equally surprising, tracks from Dopamine, like “Everything is Easy” and “Back to Zero,” already had quite a few fans singing along even though the record only came out about a month ago.

Interestingly enough, Third Eye Blind actually did more acoustic, stripped down versions of their songs than Dashboard Confessional did, so hardcore Jenkins fans got plenty of alone time with the frontman. Jenkins took advantage of the looser format playing solo allows and took the audience’s request for “How’s It Gonna Be?,” and even took the time to give a special shoutout to their bass player, hometown Vegas boy Alex LeCavalier. One of the weirdest parts of the night was definitely drummer Brad Hargreaves’s extended club-style drum solo, which was a little off the mark for this particular crowd, but it certainly showed off his skills and kept things interesting.

In the opening spot for the night was synth-driven indie pop band Night Terrors of 1927, a band I wish I’d Googled before seeing their set, because I could have saved myself a lot of time thinking “goddamn those guys looks familiar.” Turns out the band is an indie electro pop duo of Blake Sennett (Rilo Kiley, The Elected) and Jarrod Gorbel (The Honorary Title), along with a slew of very talented touring musicians.

While their music wasn’t exactly in my wheelhouse I do see a lot of potential within the Coachella crowd. Gorbel’s looks lend himself to a heartthrob role, and he has a very theatrical style on stage, grasping at air, flipping his hair – and the group of girls behind me were looking the band up immediately, checking other tour dates to plan a potential road trip. Their sound is so…big, and that combined with the members’ clout, and being signed to Atlantic – I can’t imagine them playing anything but huge venues – and it looks like they’re getting quite comfortable doing just that. You can catch them at Life is Beautiful, Sept. 25-27.

-Ashleigh Thompson

Photos by Emily Matview | https://www.flickr.com/photos/holdfastnow/