Philly Local Philes: The Menzingers’ “I Was Born”
There’s an impulse to call The Menzingers “working-class punk.” You hear the sonic parallels to today’s power-chord common-men in Against Me! and The Gaslight Anthem, you read about the band’s roots in the post-industrial coal/steel town of Scranton, PA, and it’s an easy comparison to make. But really, there’s nothing exclusively working-class about guitar, bass, drums, and slammin’ songs—so it’s probably more accurate to report that The Menzingers are simply a punk rock band. (“Rock band” would also suffice.) That said, there is something vaguely populist about the way the four-piece has drummed up a legion of rabid fans without any kind of heavy hitting label behind them. (Unless you consider Red Scare Industries a heavy hitter—which is certainly a debate worth having.) Earlier this week the band appeared on WKDU and, according to DJ Mike Larkey, they “broke the Internet”—so many people were logging on to their website to listen that the stream couldn’t handle the traffic. Yesterday’s e-newsletter from R5 Productions reported that tickets for The Menzingers’ first headlining show at the First Unitarian Church (this Sunday, 1/23) were “selling like hot cakes.” It’s an all-local bill, too: Algernon Cadwalader, Tiger’s Jaw, Glocca Morra. Something’s going down here, something real is causing the groundswell, it’s not being forced by publicists or hype-bot’ed into people’s brains. Give a listen to “I Was Born” below and decide for yourselves.
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Nedved
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Jim