The Volume & the Ugliness

Wild Flag Sells out Paradise Rock Club

“What we need is more contemporary rock music that addresses or mirrors the chaos, the gray areas and the uneasiness,” Wild Flag singer/guitarist Carrie Brownstein once wrote on her music blog, “Monitor Mix” for NPR.

In her now-defunct column, Brownstein lamented the slow death of discord in rock music over the past decade in an open plea to musicians of the future—musicians who aren’t afraid of “volume, ugliness or bombast.”

The former Sleater-Kinney guitarist and co-star of IFC show Portlandia, along with bandmates Mary Timony (vocals/guitar), Rebecca Cole (keys/backing vocals) and Janet Weiss (drums/backing vocals), certainly brought back that roaring discord at Paradise Rock Club on Saturday, evoking a fierce surge of nostalgia and youthfulness from the aging hipster crowd as they tore through their eponymous album. Brownstein’s bold guitar riffs cut through the sticky air as Weiss’s unapologetically stomp-inducing drum beats transported the audience back to the early ’90s:  a time when new music arrived untethered by genre and people felt a sense of reckless optimism, spurred by the phenomena of dial-up connections, high-waisted jeans and the Clinton administration.

This begone feeling first reared its head during a solid, albeit forgettable, opening performance from Brooklyn natives Hospitality, during which an audience member behind me got into a heated conversation with her friend. Shouting over the drone of the guitar, she slurred, “Man, f—k Courtney Love! F—k that murderer b-tch!”

This emphatic statement seemed to so utterly encapsulate everything the audience was about at Wild Flag’s sold-out show that I had to shake my head and smile. These audience members were the people that never got over Kurt Cobain’s death or the night their band opened for Pavement. These were the people who crave the volume and the ugliness, the vanguards of true music fandom, and they filled the Paradise on Saturday because Wild Flag reignites that side of their former selves. Because Wild Flag’s sound is nostalgia without regret, brashness without apology.

The audience certainly took Timony’s cry on “Electric Band,” to heart: “Dance all night or turn to sand/Come and join our electric band.” Although Brownstein claimed to be losing her voice, she and Timony methodically tore through all of the songs from the album, plus several new tracks and a crowd-pleasing cover of Fugazi’s “Margin Walker” to close out the encore.

Timony, who graduated from Boston University in 1992 with a degree in English literature, playfully joked with the crowd, asking if anyone was in a sorority or fraternity there and whether there was, like, a guitar shredder sorority that she could join. This banter only heightened her effortless cool as she high-kicked and knee-slid her way through the perfectly executed “Glass Tambourine,” backed by a high-energy performance from Brownstein and scintillating vocal harmonies from Weiss and Cole.

The whole performance felt refreshingly raw in its salute to pure, unadulterated rock, charmingly uncalculated yet unrelenting in fire. As Brownstein’s fingers effortlessly slid up and down the guitar neck, the audience seemed to rekindle a connection with their younger selves, the ones who inked band names onto the canvas of their backpacks during class and waited in line outside of record stores just to buy the new Sleater-Kinney album with the bonus track inside. A band with a sound like Wild Flag will grab ahold of that adolescent self and force you to remember it, while making sure you have a damn good time doing so.