Tag: phoenix theater
Punx Not Dead in Petaluma – Home Sick 2 at the Pheonix Theater
Nicole Verto
January 30, 2019
“Is punk dead?” I’ve typically found this refrain loathsome and lazy. Despite my ongoing aversion to the utterance, it was front and center in my own (traitor) brain during the week leading up to Home Sick 2. You see, after almost forty years, the punk institution known as Maximum Rocknroll announced that the zine would cease printing in 2019. The notion hit me hard. I recalled being fourteen and seeing MRR for the first time as a young teenager and traced from there to the first time I saw the rows and rows of green-taped records myself. It felt like a death. I went to three other shows in the days between the announcement and attending Home Sick 2 but HS2 was the one that really shook me out of my cynicism. Of course punk is not dead. Of course the community is still growing and reaching folks of all ages. Even better: those of us already in too deep seem to be better than ever at welcoming other sounds into our spaces. The curators behind Home Sick (none other than headliners Ceremony) managed to again create a space both familiar and refreshingly representative of this constant evolution happening within
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If Ever A Band Was My Home: Ceremony’s HOME SICK Festival At The Phoenix Theater
Rob Shepyer
January 18, 2018
I have been waiting for so long to write about Ceremony that referencing their performances in completely unrelated articles just became a habit of mine. If I was writing about hardcore punk moshing and stage diving then I’d compare the peaks of that violence to the bar set by Ceremony when Anthony Anzaldo strums the first notes of “Kersed” or when Jake Casorotti starts the kick drum intro to their cover of Red C’s “Pressure’s On”. If I was talking about Joy Division’s many offspring, like in my Cloak and Dagger review, I’d talk about how Ceremony’s “L Shaped Man” is the only derivative of that style worth its weight. If I was talking about what I feel is the spirit of America as expressed in music, I would say it’s when Ceremony plays “Hysteria” and you can almost transport yourself back in time when Bill Haley & His Comets performed “Rock Around The Clock”, it’s that same desperate need to let loose, still in the air after half a century. “…The only young band I’ve seen come close was Ceremony performing “Kersed” at Sound and Fury 2016, when the entire audience erupted when the opening notes of the song
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