But no one told Pup.
The Toronto punk quartet unleashed one of their typically rowdy ragers on Saturday night at the Fillmore Silver Spring for a floor packed with youngsters. There were a brave few who were blissfully unaware of age (and physique) as they crowd-surfed the night away while casually shouting standout songs, including the halfway through “DVP” peak.
This crazy tight 149-second dash conveys a particularly bad fit of desire for a girlfriend and the self-destruction that makes her not want to be there. “Three beers, and I’m so messed up / I’m getting drunk and can’t shut up!” frontman Stefan Babcock cried, but the messy line of catharsis came seconds later. “I don’t know what to do/I’m still [messed] above you !”
Babcock, in his early thirties, embodies a class clown spirit spit through a charming nasal growl. But if you listen to him unleash his witty, acerbic, doubtful jabs, you begin to realize that he probably wrote the best essays in his English class.
Pup works best when it reveals the very small glimmer of hope between pitiful self-mockery at failures and an understanding of how one must reject the emptiness of despair in order to keep moving forward.
The whole aging process is much easier when you have four guys going through it together. Babcock toured the stage and was joined on unique anthems by drummer Zack Mykula, whose frenetic beats are the backbone of chaos, and lead guitarist Steve Sladkowski, who played riffs with bassist Nestor. Chumak. Pup has the same burst of pop-punk fun as Blink-182, if they all went to therapy.
“I guess it doesn’t matter anyway,” Babcock said in the chorus of the night’s closing song, “Kids,” which is a devotion to a partner who thinks the world is too. stupid than you. “I don’t care about anything but you/I guess it doesn’t matter anyway/because I don’t care about anything.” ”
It’s a tough position to maintain, but Pup pulls it off. Some fans are drawn to the solidarity found in songs about nonsense and pithy reactions to his mess. But Babcock can’t continue to implode his life for a few songs. There was a pearl of wisdom towards the end of the night’s performance in “Puptheband Inc. Is Filing For Bankruptcy”:
“Too old for adolescent angst, too young to be washed away,” he yelled at living in this murky maturation phase, where nothing feels quite poetic or hard-earned. “I used to be reckless and too broke to eat / Now all my friends got bidets in their suites.”
Growing up doesn’t mean you still can’t be a little cocky while having fun with your friends about the ups and downs to come – as long as you can do it together.
