Bill Goffrier at the Replay Lounge

​”Y’all like the punk rock?” Bill Goffrier wryly asked the audience two songs into his performance at The Replay Lounge on Friday evening. It was a question heavily steeped in irony. For one, Bill Goffrier was once a member of the legendary underground art-punk band The Embarrasment, a band that Robert Christgau, no less, called a “great lost American band dispersed into the wilds of Wichita.”

The irony was that Goffrier, of course, was not playing punk rock, but instead playing acoustic renditions of The Embarassment’s songs and material from later band Big Dipper. The audience, mostly art-punk lifers, was in on the joke from the beginning. But surely the appeal of catching Goffier strum these songs — some nearly thirty years old — is that it reminds them of the punk rock iterations they grew up with.

Now, an early evening acoustic patio show at The Replay is a bit like a marshmallow-filled cowpie. With each artist you get increasingly close to the gooey sugary center, but it takes a lot of swallowing to get there.