The crowd was still very thin when the five men, who called themselves Suburban Moms, opened for Ceremony on Thursday night at the Center for the Arts. It was barely 8 pm, but their punk rage, especially that of their frontman who looked like a kid, was truly impressive.
This little guy sure knew how to work out his crowd, looking totally pissed off on stage, shouting his vocals like a mad man, kneeling down or furiously balancing and jumping, pushing the ten people around to start his own mosh pit. And very soon it was real, his drunken antics had totally worked, as they seemed to have been inspired from the greatest names of punk. They had instantaneously created mayhem and destruction over fast-loud discordant guitars and firing drum beats.
Not surprisingly, they wrote Black Flag as their first ‘likes’ on their Facebook page, and they certainly had this same furious pissed off sound, although the young singer may have been closer to Morris size-wise than all-muscle Rollins. At one point, he climbed on an amp, and, surprisingly, managed to do some crowd surfing over the few people standing there, which carried him back safe and sound to the stage. It takes some guts, and he certainly had some with his epileptic-mental-ward acrobatic moves.
‘Thank you for choking me’ he said after one of his numerous interactions with the crowd, ‘It felt great’, he also seemed to have been in that kind of dark humor.
With their aggressive-crushing riffs and atonal angst, suburban Moms sounded as if they had been at the greatest punk-rock school,… but don’t get me wrong, it didn’t sound or look like a mimic or a pale copy, it was a pure and real punk craziness.