Ceremony at The Palladium by Albert Licano
As 2024 launches into orbit, I see our Los Angeles music scene and its veterans coming full circle as the year’s trajectory begins to take shape. Ceremony’s epic Palladium show celebrating the anniversary of 2010’s Rhonert Park EP was the biggest headlining show of their career, performing in front of 3,700 people. It was a moment created completely by the organic devotion of their fans and not by a music industry needing new rock stars. It was the moment Ceremony received their flowers.
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For as long as Ceremony has been my favorite band, I’ve considered them an underground darling. Their shows were more energetic than seeing a major rock band. You’d go to a show and think “everyone who loves live music ought to see this at least once”, yet people just assumed hardcore couldn’t break the ceiling above any underground music act. Sound and Fury, though, could imagine otherwise. The festival had been the engine behind Ceremony’s Southern California icon-status, giving our hardcore scene unforgettable sets with the band like their 2016 Regent set, their 2018 headlining Belasco set, their Your Life in America series of three nights at the Echo, and their 2023 surprise Exposition Park set. Still, one could argue Ceremony never truly became as big as they should have…until this last weekend. This was their Beef Bologna on SNL moment. It took decades, but finally, Ceremony had arrived. Those decades required hard work and patience, but in that time, their works had ripened into California punk classics. Their third album, 2010’s Rohnert Park, titled after their Northern California suburb, is hailed as the purest sample of Ceremony’s magic.
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Rohnert Park could only begin with a diagnosis. Simply titled “Into The Wayside Part I/Sick”, the lyrics paint a picture of someone sick of American hypocrisy, both on a political and social level, this sickened someone refuses to be divided along party lines and defined by old ideas. Throughout the song they blaspheme against sacred cows like Barak Obama, Cro-Mags, or Black Flag, every old idol gets toppled in this song. The album then continues down a path of destruction, two tracks you can imagine a skater bombing hills to, “M.C.D.F. and Moving Principal”. After which that path levels out and the album quiets down with “The Doldrums” as you skate past all the empty heads of your little town that contribute to its lack of culture. You can feel Rohnert Park no matter where you grow up, but if you grew up in a quiet, boring American suburb, you’ve felt it before you ever listened.
The narrator’s anger over the lack of color in their world gets directed inward and songs like “Open Head” ask the audience to join in on breaking open a cranium to remove all its contents and cram in new ideas. “Into The Wayside Part II” gave audiences a glimpse into Ceremony’s artistic intentions. Poems and abstract soundscapes between tracks to make each album a cohesive work of art.
We get more hardcore bounce and more cowbell with “Terminal Addiction” then the demented “Don’t Touch Me” gets your feet moving. The bass string nearly snap under the visceral fist against authority in “Back in ‘84”. With three more stiff punches to the head, the album keeps the pit moving with “All the Time”, “The Pathos”, and “Nigh To Life”. These are the songs that lead to Rohnert Park’s conclusion, “Into The Wayside Part III”. The song lifts you back into suburban hypnosis, sailing back to a reality that you’ve always sensed was phony. Depending on where you’re from, the art that is Rohnert Park can be closer to reality than the reality you live in.
In previous reviews, I’ve likened the feeling of a Ceremony show to that of how young Americans reacted to first hearing “Rock Around The Clock”. Back then, hipsters let that song dissolve all their inhibitions, granting them the courage to mob the stage and dance before there was ever a phenomenon known as stage diving. Similarly, Ceremony captures an instinctual American sensibility. Uniformity begging to be destroyed in a violent, sexual, eruption of dance, mosh, dive and bang. And perhaps it was the Palladium’s sound mix, but I never heard a cleaner, less distorted Ceremony set than this. It gave their California brand of hardcore a much more accessible feel, even though their fans never had any trouble accessing their most disturbed recordings.
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To celebrate Rohnert Park, Sound and Fury compiled a lineup for the ages. It was masterfully put together, like rare spices for gourmet soup. Beginning with Blazing Eye, Ceremony wasn’t the only band to get the stage they deserved. That LA street punk icons and scene leaders, Blazing Eye, could play the palladium should bring a tear to every diehard Los Punk’s eye. This kind of recognition is resolution to a band’s local mythos, a climax to a chapter in their story.
Then, to fill the evening with alternative energy and offset the brutality that would soon ensue, Gouge Away delivered their signature brand of enlightened hardcore, a much-needed softening of the heart. Giving the audience no doubt as to where Ceremony stands on their loyalty to hardcore, Soul Search made the whole room bounce with such pure attitude that left everyone bruised up and tougher for it. Then, the moment many were waiting for, fucking Infest played.
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Imagining Infest playing to 4,000 people could fill you with enough violent energy to punch through a window for the sake of feeling yourself bleed. By then, the floor was covered in numerous bloods anyway, as we all went psychotic, listening to the original purveyors of Power Violence, led by a man that looks like a silverback Gorilla and a tank had a child, Joe Denunzio. This was violence personified. Every dance on the Palladium floor posed possible death if you dared get in the way. It was brutal, it was beautiful, it was unforgettable, and it would go down in hardcore history.
Before coming on, Ceremony were ushered in by Neil Young’s “Keep on Rocking in The Free World”. It might’ve sounded corny in the ears of fans awaiting hardcore, but the sentiment was felt across the sea of fans. We were all angry at something, this intro gave that anger meaning. From there, the band played Rohnert Park from start to finish, concluding the show with a tearful dedication to many friends the band lost throughout their career. Once they completed the album, they played a few songs from their post-punk era and finished with their two hardest anthems, “Pressure’s On” and “Kersed”. As tradition goes, Ross introduced Pressure’s On by saying, “This song is about the police”. When people cheered, thinking they were about to mosh their faces off, Ross instructed them to boo for the police instead. These boo’s were so loud, they shook the house harder than any of the night’s music.
I wouldn’t say Ceremony is a political band. I think they make music about what it’s really like living in America. About trying to live a normal existence and keep your sanity while the forces that apply pressure all around you constantly wage war and injustice at home and abroad.
The gratitude the band shared on this night could only be matched by the crowd’s happiness for Ceremony. We were all thrilled the band we loved finally got to have a moment like this. They got to play a sold-out show on the same stage as Metallica, Black Flag, and all those other artists with fabricated audiences and massive marketing pushes. Ceremony, if anything, has always been an organic phenomenon. The flowers given to Ceremony were not given to them by the music industry, by an algorithm, or even by the necessity to make rockstars. They were given to Ceremony by the same scene that has loved them since their first Sound and Fury. We showed the industry on this night. If they don’t want to take bands like Ceremony to the top, we will do it ourselves.
Words by: Rob Shepyer
Photos by: Albert Licano
