The Wonder Years will be coming to First Avenue on Wednesday, November 14th for a can’t miss night of sing-a-longs and raging angst. If you were ever a fan of the pop-punk movement that took over in the early 2000’s, I urge you to check this show out. The Wonder Years, along with the other bands on the bill, have taken that teenage angst and grown with age alongside all of us who are no longer 13 and hating their parents but now late twenty-something and are just trying to get by.
The Wonder Years are a band & they are a band from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania & they came to life in 2005 & they write songs & those songs are sometimes about people they love & those songs are sometimes about people you might have loved & those songs are sometimes about a city that could be the city you live in or a neighborhood that feels like it could be your neighborhood & they put those songs on albums & they put those songs on The Upsides in 2010 & they put those songs on Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing in 2011 & on The Greatest Generation in 2013 & on No Closer to Heaven in 2015 & those albums were loved by critics & even more loved by fans & their shows are awash with a genuine emotional energy that only they can pull out of a room & The Wonder Years are a band made up of old friends & they play rock & roll music & they play it like they mean it & they have played it in a lot of places & in front of a lot of people & they have played it in dive bars & arenas & outside with the whole sky bowing & they have played it on five continents & they have played it in thirty countries & they are still counting & Sister Cities is their new album & it is an album about how all of our distance might not be so wide after all & it was written with the world on fire & all of the songs sound like they are trying to build you a bridge from somewhere bad to somewhere better & The Wonder Years are a band & they are also bridge builders.
A personal favorite of mine- Have Mercy- will be supporting TWY. Too often bands are concerned with creating the perfect album rather than the right one. HAVE MERCY have tried the former in the past, but on MAKE THE BEST OF IT, out on Hopeless Records, they succeeded in the latter. During the writing and recording of Make The Best Of It—a seven-month affair with producers Paul Leavitt (All Time Low) and Brian McTernan (Thrice)—Swindle made sure to internalize the essence of Have Mercy and let that guide the songwriting. In fact, this self-reflection led to something unprecedented for the singer: scrapping an entire album’s worth of songs and rewriting the whole thing from scratch in the studio. In the end, this patience was rewarded. Make The Best Of It is all at once raw and composed, lyrically heavy but brimming with indelible melodies. It balances soaring ballads like “Baby Grand” and “Ghost” and riff-heavy, full-throated “Smoke and Lace” and “Begging For Bones” with ease, placing Have Mercy somewhere between the emo scene they came up in and wider rock landscape that’s teeming with opportunities.
Oso Oso and Shortly will be kicking the night off.
Tickets are still available here.
Remaining Tour Dates:
11/06 – Quebec, QC @ Salle Multi
11/07 – Ottawa, ON @ Brass Monkey
11/08 – London, ON @ London Music Hall
11/11 – Fort Wayne, IN @ Piere’s
11/13 – Des Moines, IA @ Wooly’s *
11/14 – Minneapolis, MN @ First Avenue *
11/16 – Lawrence, KS @ Granada Theater
11/17 – Fort Collins, CO @ Washington’s *
11/18 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Complex
11/21 – Albuquerque, NM @ Sunshine Theater
11/23 – Austin, TX @ Mohawk
11/24 – Corpus Christi, TX @ Brewster St. Ice House
11/26 – New Orleans, LA @ House Of Blues
11/27 – Athens, GA @ 40 Watt
11/28 – Charleston, SC @ Music Farm
11/30 – Wilmington, DE @ The Queen
*TWY, Have Mercy, Oso Oso only
