Last week, Minneapolis-based band Motion City Soundtrack — whose songs you set to autoplay on your MySpace pages, whose lyrics you scrawled on your arms during that boring ninth-grade history class and whose very name stirs up memories of checkerboard Vans and middle school dances — played at High Dive with Relient K and Driver Friendly.
The group gave a high-energy performance punctuated with thrashing guitars, moshing guys in fedoras, heavy distortion and random crowd surfers.
High school kids with Sharpie X’s on their hands and parents in tow took selfies and screamed.
Muscle-bound boys in frat tanks, punks with blue mohawks, and girls in plaid men’s shirts and beanies gathered under one roof to see Motion City Soundtrack, which released its fifth studio album, “Go,” last year and a new single, “Inside Out,” in September.
“‘Go’ was … our most beautiful, our most textured, mature album we’ve done,” drummer Claudio Rivera said in an interview. “Where do you go from there? Let’s bring it back. Let’s strip it back down and make it rock ‘n’ roll.”
“We’ve always had the pop sense, the dark, adult, like, in-Justin’s-head lyrics,” keyboardist Jesse Johnson said, “and we’ve also had aggressive Jawbox, Fugazi guitars. We’ve always battled on how everything melts together.”
Where the tracks on “Go” were polished, “Inside Out” is rough around the edges. “Go” was edged with a little more pop than the group’s previous albums, especially on tracks such as “True Romance” — a love song — and the beginning track, “Circuits and Wires.”
“Inside Out” is a return to punk — angrier, more frantic and more aggressive.
All in all, it’s the type of music that sounds good through headphones and car stereos but sounds even better live in a small black-box venue like High Dive.
Although the band is returning to an earlier punk sound and playing rock shows, the men have matured both musically and personally.
“I mean, everyone’s married except me,” Rivera said. “We’re in our early- and mid-30s ... It kind of happens automatically with time. I shudder to think about a 35- or 40-year-old that’s still, like, boozing it up at a dive bar and getting crazy. It’s something that happens as you grow up. Your tastes refine.”
“And it’s just being in a band — putting out albums for 12 years,” Johnson said. “If we put out the same album six times in a row, it’d probably be pretty boring.”
A version of this story ran on page 7 on 11/14/2013 under the headline "Motion City Soundtrack draws nostalgic crowd"
Singer and songwriter Justin Pierre performs with the rest of his band, Motion City Soundtrack, at High Dive on Nov. 6. Relient K and Driver Friendly also played at the show.
