Off The Freakin' Chain

I took that title from one of the comments on The Demeanors' MySpace page. They were amazingly good in their first show, and think the crowd (other than family and friends) was a bit surprised at how young they were.


They were the first band of the night, being the youngest and the least experienced, so they had the experience of doing the sound check. The Metaphor Cafe is a small club but it has a decent sound and lighting set-up.


They were there early and so we had an hour or so to kill before the show started. It was interesting to watch how the cafe transformed slowly into a music venue as night came and the ska kids started to file in. By 7 there was a decent crowd and they finally started to play.

They began the show with a couple of their more straight punk tunes, with just drums, guitar, and bass. Both are remarkably good songs (in my opinion) and they sounded good playing them. After that they brought the horns on stage and proceeded with their ska songs. Their only cover was Sublime's "What I Got", but all of their original songs were pretty strong. The horns were spot on, as if they'd been playing together forever. My son's friend Ben is evolving into a pretty talented front-man for the band, in addition to being the bassist. Brandon, the drummer, is excellent. He gives them a stronger pulse than the typical ska band and i think it works well. In my obviously objective opinion it was a solid live set. I wish it had been longer, but since Nathan broke a string on the last song it was probably for the best that it ended when it did.

It's definitely weird being at a show as a parent. You figure that in the eyes of the average teen-ager you must be some variant of creepy old dude, so it's hard not to feel conspicuous. Most of the band-members parents ended up gathered in the same area near the back of the club, and it was like some sort of strange reversal of the kids' table.