Queen of Jeans, another Philly band that had swung by to open for B&C, gave a nervous opening set that stuck with me. In closing his own chapter, Simmons seemed to understand that something, larger, greater, was over.
For one last night, Simmons would hold on to them for us, isn’t that the point? These were songs about telephones not picked up and emotions that we weren’t letting go. Behind me, a mosh circle had formed, bodies wrapped in thick polyester slamming against each other like it was 2009 and we were still in somebody’s basement. But Simmons felt more at home lobbing the quiet/loud volleys of his old, urgent demands of emotional purity. “Postcard,” which was programed by Will Yip on the record as their take on an AltNation footstomper revealed itself as trad rock, Robbie Robertson stuff which would suffice. On the other hand, little attempt was given to do any justice to the sticky synths and vocoder vocals of 2016’s Light We Made, the album that was supposed to make it, B&C’s first record on a major label and, now, their last on any. When he gave himself in the genre theatrics, like the hands grasping the mike on the fire-setting blaze of “Reflection,” these felt like live relapses into an old habit. With minimal balance or composure, he ambled through the setlist with a hard kind of exhaustion, a tethered withholding. It was the look of a man trying very hard to give to give a fuck, just for one more night, for the kids. Simmons had arrived that night as a picture-perfect portrait of the post-Hot Topic decade: the stripped shirt and jeans, the hoodie that did double-duty as a cardigan. It was a tour about incarcerating the band’s perfect recordings of pummeled angst into the deep freeze of memory, untainted.
In this light, the B&C’s anniversary tour felt like a breakup on the band’s own terms, sans scrutinize-able facebook statements or strange acrimony.
Elsewhere, Lil Peep, a rapper who became one of the next new things for his melding of emo angst and aesthetics with rap flow, had died suddenly of a fentanyl overdose. Few were sticking around the closer the scene came to bursting through the floorboards: fellow Philadelphia fourth-wavers like Modern Baseball and JANK had dissolved in mists of anguished mental health and old school icons Brand New, who had returned to the spotlight to release their most successful record yet, went back into hiatus after sexual misconduct allegations surfaced against frontman Jesse Lacey.
He has reason to feel emotional: the tour is suspected to be the band’s last, as Simmons told a podcast last month that the shows would be his band’s “ last full U.S.” The news was hardly a rumor either: behind me a chorus of long hair and sweatshirts opined on it between songs, peppering the night air with solitary, divorce children cries of “Don’t break up,” “Stay together.”Ģ017 wasn’t the best year for emotional rock and the impending breakup of a band that only a year ago was on the verge of mass communication was cruelly par for course. “I’m emotional, I feel crazy” Jon Simmons of Philadelphia’s Balance and Composure uttered in the middle of his set as his band’s 10 th anniversary tour hit Manhattan’s Bowery Ballroom this weekend.