Opium Meth for the People

As well it should have been, because Bad Religion put on a hell of a show. Things got off to a little bit of a rocky start, as the band had some technical difficulties that really interfered with the first four or five songs of their set. But that's the Electric Factory for you. Once the sound got on track, the show was just about as good as we possibly could have hoped. The setlist had a heavy contingent of tracks from Bad Religion's latest album, New Maps of Hell, with plenty of older songs thrown in. To make the setlist, Bad Religion apparently gathered feedback from their fans via pickRset. Just how much of an influence the fan choices had in making the actual setlist is unknown, but we really dig the idea.

One negative about the show, and we really shouldn't even call it that, was that it made us realize how woefully unfamiliar with much of Bad Religion's music we really are, which we realize (especially now) is unacceptable. We own three of their albums and are moderately familiar with three others, but that doesn't even cover half the band's catalog. Everyone else at the show, on the other hand, knew every word to every blistering-fast song. And we always liked Bad Religion, but we never appreciated how much we should like Bad Religion until the concert. There aren't many bands who manage to say musically and topically relevant for five years, let alone the twenty-five years that Bad Religion has been going at it. And they've been making music more-or-less constantly over that time.

The only thing that really kind of bugged us about the show was that Bad Religion didn't come on stage until 10:00 PM. This wouldn't have bothered us so much if the first band of the evening, Jena Berlin hadn't been, well, possibly the worst band we've ever heard outside a high school battle of the bands. Come to think of it, we've been to a couple high school battles of the bands where Jena Berlin would have finished dead last. The Briggs were a serviceable, if unoriginal, opener, and the concert really would have been perfectly fine if it was just Bad Religion and The Briggs, or Bad Religion and The Briggs and anyone but Jena Berlin. We would have liked Bad Religion to start earlier, and we would have liked them to then play about twenty minutes longer to get up to that hour and forty-five minute to two hour range. But now we're nitpicking. All in all, we were more than pleased with Bad Religion's performance. And judging by how sweaty the crowd looked at the end of the show, so were the people in the pit.

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