A Presidential candidate cult of personality briefly surfaced at Jeff Rosenstock’s raucous Bottleneck return

Nick Spacek, Andrew Dodderidge,
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Jeff Rosenstock. // photo by Nick Spacek

Jeff Rosenstock
with Chris Farren
The Bottleneck
Sunday, July 21

When the first crowd surfer at Jeff Rosenstock’s Sunday night return to The Bottleneck jumped up on the stage before sifting their way through the packed house, I was into it. By the 20th to 30th time, not so much.

It’s 2024. We live in a day and age where, for a lot of people, concerts are either an excuse to drink your butt off or deliver an ego check. Well, I guess it’s always been this way. But making the night about you makes me lose a lot of respect for you as a member of this culture in this environment.

The overwhelming majority of surfers laid there bare, phone in hand, recording their entire excursion to “fame,” so much so that bassist John DeDomenici made an accusatory statement in the middle of their career sprawling set, one aligning with this attitude I adopted.

One moment late in the night, probably near 10:30 p.m., saw another member call out a dude in the front row.

“You gotta chill out, you’re making the people around you have a real bad time.”

The music itself did not cease to allow these type of distractions to take aim at the quality of the night, with Antarctigo Vespucci frontman Chris Farren and Rosenstock sticking to what they do best, and respecting the extremes of the music industry, whether it be Farren opening his set with the blaring of Charli XCX’s “360” or Rosenstock doing the same with System of a Down’s “Chop Suey!” Funny enough, Rosenstock recorded his newest album HELLMODE in the same EastWest studio in Hollywood which System’s Toxicity was bred, coming in full circle on the final verse.

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Chris Farren. // photo by Nick Spacek

Farren also aimed much higher in another sector, throwing his name into the presidential election the same day that Democratic incumbent Joe Biden bowed out of the race, an ongoing joke throughout the night. His set flirted with premeditated, over-the-top disaster, with jokes along that line and audience cue cards flashing on a screen behind him, telling the audience to clap or sifting through a slideshow of “My Favorite City in the World” posters copy and pasted for each town on the tour.

His back-and-forth with Rosenstock when coming out to perform Vespucci songs during Jeff’s encore also provided some levity and showed the duo’s silliness around each other in full bloom, as Farren briefly mentioned Avatar 3 after their pop punk burner “Freakin’ U Out,” followed by naming the resulting Avatar releases and their respective predicted release years—“Avatar 4, 2027…Avatar 5, 2028.”

Rosenstock’s 28-(maybe 29?)-song set was exactly as I described earlier – career-spanning. Five studio albums since the inception of his solo material in ‘15 have resulted in seemingly universal praise (some more than others), but debut You Cool? and its both apathetic and empathetic approach to life is fully represented in hit cut “You, in Weird Cities,” a track that Rosenstock expounded upon in length near the end of the 90-minute riot.

Then I went home and went online, piecing together webs going through my mind. Now, I’m a bit closer to fully embracing the atmosphere I once considered destructive. Rosenstock has always wanted this.

A lot of my research came from this exceptional Noisey piece on his previous group Bomb the Music Industry!, which describes him in-detail as a person with little-to-no financial motives, something that may have changed since taking a full-time composer gig for Craig of the Creek, and someone that appreciates the idea that the band is not him – it’s everybody.

During the Bomb era, he kept shows to a minimum price range, typically around $10. His record label, Quote Unquote Records, set the trend that Radiohead got the credit for with In Rainbows a few years later by releasing punk music for free online. He even accepted blank CDs at his shows, burning their latest record on them for the listener to experience.

The man that left his first band, The Arrogant Sons of Bitches because he “didn’t wanna fucking sell stuff anymore” is fully committed to the communion-fronted musical journey. Sure, maybe some things got out of hand. I mean, all I could think of when an audience member jumped up on stage and shouted in Mike Huguenor’s mic the lyrics to another Jeff banger was that Swans frontman Michael Gira would’ve stopped the show and told everybody to go home.

But Rosenstock is his own person, and all the better for it. After postponing their ‘23 fall tour because of COVID reasons, it’s truly awesome to see them running a million miles an hour since.

All photos by Nick Spacek

Jeff Rosenstock

Jeff Rosenstock setlist
Chop Suey! (System of a Down cover – over speakers, joined on final verse)
WILL U STILL U
HEAD
Scram
LIKED U BETTER
DOUBT
Festival Song
SOFT LIVING
Wave Goodnight to Me
FUTURE IS DUMB
I Did Something Weird Last Night
Nausea
***BNB
HEALMODE
ILLEGAL FIREWORKS AND HIDING BOTTLES IN THE SAND
Polar Bear or Africa
Leave it in The Ska
(interlude?)
I WANNA BE WRONG
GRAVEYARD SONG
Hey Allison!
9/10
You, in Weird Cities
3 SUMMERS
Encore:
Antarctigo Vespucci with Chris Farren
Freakin’ U Out
I’m Giving Up on U2 / Beverly Hills (Weezer cover, partial)

Pash Rash
We Begged 2 Explode

Chris Farren

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