Two Nights of Bayside and Smoking Popes at Emo’s 6/27 and 6/28

By Erik Casarez

Bayside

The current climate of 2000s emo nostalgia has gifted older millennials with a plethora of band reunions over the past half-decade. It’s become beneficial for a band to break up or go on an indefinite hiatus to build up momentum of fan demand for the inevitable reunion. Some may question the sincerity of these reunions and dismiss them as a cash grab, while others relish in the thought of seeing a band they never got the chance to see live for the first time. It’s easy to get so lost in the sauce of these highly anticipated band reconciliations that you can sometimes forget about the bands that have been consistently soldiering on over the past two-and-a-half decades. However, if the crowds at Emo’s on June 27 and June 28 are any indication, nobody is forgetting about how much they love Bayside.

Bayside

To be completely transparent, I missed out on Bayside in the heyday of Warped Tour. I don’t know why, but they weren’t on my radar, and there is intense regret for missing out on being obsessed with them in high school. While I was aware of them, it wasn’t until I saw them open up for Taking Back Sunday in 2012 that I truly appreciated them. They were as energetic this past weekend as they were over a decade ago. You can tell a lot about a band by comparing how they play shows as openers vs how they play shows as headliners, and when the two performances are just as enthralling, you know you have a band that is giving it their all.

This tour commemorates 25 years of Bayside as they play back-to-back nights of two different sets, playing songs across their entire discography. Lead singer Anthony Raneri vocalized how excited they were to play songs deep in their bag that they don’t normally get to play by extending each tour stop with two dates. While pop-punk bands often choose between the paths of Blink-182, NOFX, or Green Day starter kits, Bayside seems to channel the likes of Alkaline Trio on their path to cultivating their sound. The spooky guitar riffs cut like 80s slasher film chase scenes with spices of metal guitar tones intermixed with fast power chords that sound like straight eighths even when they’re syncopated. They find the sweet spot between skate punk and pop punk, eliciting the kind of movement reserved specifically for throwing down.

Smoking Popes

It feels only appropriate that they invited Smoking Popes to open up for them – another band that truly threads the needle between punk and pop, but in a very different way. Lead singer Josh Caterer’s crooning subverts your expectations of a band influenced by the Chicago punk scene and, whether intentional or not, you can hear echoes of the sound in 4th wave emo bands’ melodic deadpan vocal delivery. At first glance, it may feel unusual to see a band that had a song on the Clueless soundtrack share the stage with a band that were Warped Tour mainstays, but it just makes so much sense. Furthermore, Caterer talks about meeting Bayside for the first time 20 years ago when Bayside covered Smoking Popes song “Megan.” When it came time to play it during Smoking Popes’ set, Caterer introduced it as them doing a version of Bayside’s version of their song. 

Smoking Popes

Two nights in a row of any band can feel a little overwhelming, but the variety of songs that Bayside played made it feel more like an extended set with a 24-hour intermission. Ending the first night with their most popular (and my favorite) song “Devotion and Desire” and the second night with their second most popular song “Sick, Sick, Sick” after sets of favorites and deep cuts just goes to show that even after 25 years, Bayside still knows how to give their fans their cake and let them eat it too.