I had never listened to the Wrens until Thursday. I listened to their album Meadowlands three or four times, and Seacaucus once, by the time of the show last night. I was really impressed by Meadowlands, especially tracks 2-4, which were incredible rock songs. I was psyched for the Friday Night Rock show, even more psyched than I was for their last big act, Mates of State. Then I even met the Wrens before the show, when they were just chilling and eating at Panda House with some of the FNR organizers. I was struck by how totally cool and unassuming they were, and how middle-aged. My friend, truly one of their biggest fans ever, and visibly elated, asked them if they remembered how he e-mailed them like a month ago because he could not believe it when he heard the Wrens were coming to Dartmouth so he naturally just e-mailed the band and asked them if it was true. The drummer of the band, who responded to my friend's e-mail, was like, "Yeah, I remember you." Then I took the liberty to ask them, "So what are you guys doing after the show?", hoping to score some hang-out time with the Wrens. They politely explained they had to go to St. Louis for a show at Wash U tomorrow -- their only show, other than the one at Dartmouth, scheduled for March, as you can see on their website. Two shows, back-to-back, halfway across the country from each other, at smallish colleges, in all of one month, for a band of guys in their 30s and 40s, who once basically turned down a milliondollar contract-of-a-lifetime (which would go to Creed) because they actually had some artistic integrity. Having discovered all this about the Wrens, and by this time thinking "Man, these guys are really good, and cool as hell," I still was not prepared for the show the Wrens put on last night at Fuel.
The Wrens played last night with an intensity I've never seen before. Now I don't go to that many concerts, but bands I've seen in the past few years include Radiohead, the Rapture, the Cure, and Weezer. And all of them rocked pretty hard, putting a lot into their music and their performance. But the Wrens outdid them all, in terms of intensity. The Wrens got people in Fuel -- in Fuel -- to just flip out, dancing, jumping, moshing, singing at the top of their lungs, clapping frantically in rhythm, getting up "on stage" with the band to add to their rhythm section by shaking shakers and banging drumsticks. And then there were the softer moments -- like the first half of "Happy," with its steady crescendo, driving bass drum, and devastating, booming guitar riff right before the transition to an ebullient ready-to-move-on-from-this-breakup celebration.
Look, I'm not going to try to do justice to the Wrens' music with my three-day-long familiarity with them. There are people like my friend who have been admiring this band as one of the best out there for a decade now. But this show was something else. If I described to you a scene in a small, sterile, second-rate venue where these late-30-year-old guys wearing cargo pants were sweating profusely, jumping around immaturely, and saying to a bunch of Ivy-League kids trying to dress hip, "You guys are fucking beautiful!" I could understand why you might think it sucked. It did anything but. It truly rocked.
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