Concert Review: Teenage Bottlerocket at the Record Bar

You know you’re a fan of a band when one of the members can take a mid-set break to use the rest room and it doesn’t bother you. Such was the case when Teenage Bottlerocket played the Record Bar on Friday night.

However, considering Ray cut his finger and bled all over the fretboard, and the show kept going, you’d be willing to cut the band a little slack, too. Hell, the band cranked out all 19 songs on the setlist, along with a spot-on cover of Poison’s “Talk Dirty to Me,” along with their own “So Cool” as an encore.

The two halves of the set (pre- and post-Kody bathroom break) both started out with a string of songs that was just unbeatable. “Skate or Die” into “Radio” into “Bigger than KISS”? “Bottlerocket” into “Welcome to the Nuthouse” into “She’s Not the One” into “Bloodbath at Burger King”? Yes, yes, yes — more please — yes. Ray’s bouncing all over the stage like his shoes are tricked out with pogo sticks, with Kody and Miguel on either side of him knocking out bass lines and guitar riffs like sentinels of pop-punk, while Brandon pounds the skins and calls out the “1234!”s.

Yes, the music Teenage Bottlerocket plays isn’t exactly going to win any awards for new, creative ways to write songs. Considering the majority of the words to “She’s Not the One” are, in fact, “she’s not the one” sung with a variety of different emphases, you oughtn’t be surprised that you could probably learn the words to most Teenage Bottlerocket songs halfway through their performance of them. They’re just so damned catchy, though. I’m a sucker for whoa-ohs and the like, and the guys in Teenage Bottlerocket have pretty much become the forerunners of the new pop-punk vanguard because they know how to make songs that use those catchy lyrics and whoa-ohs to their full advantage.