Reel Big Fish House of Blues June 29, 2014
Nostalgia is all the rage these days, but not just today. For some time, people have been looking to the past to gain current happiness in their lives. Whether the '80s are the focus, or the '60s or the '20s or even as far back as the Middle Ages, people are constantly seeking out the past to escape the monotony of everyday life.
Currently it's the '90s, a decade far enough removed from current culture, but easily remembered by most people to be the latest focus of nostalgia's lens. Big hair and flashy outfits, the growth of hip-hop, pop-punk and ska, technology, and all-around larger-than-life personas made the '90s stand out, and now people are eating it up all over again.
Thanks to the ol' Internet, it makes nostalgia that much easier to take in. Whether dusting off clips of Saved By the Bell; listening to Sublime, 311 and Dave Matthews; wearing clothes that might look a little goofy on you (see mom jeans); we are all taking it in so much that it's become somewhat of a phenomenon.
But who are we to really know how much better those times were? We only see the glamorized moments of the past, but don't really sit down and realize how much more work everyone in life has had the further back you go. So here we sit in current time, with our mobile Internet devices and fast anything, wishing we were back there: listening to bands, watching television and playing games that we used to love. But what we don't realize is that we fell out of love with those things in the first place for a reason.
And that brings us to House of Blues Sunday night, where '90s ska-punk outfit Reel Big Fish took the stage. While quite older-looking, they were still doing their thing like it was 1996. Like, nothing had changed besides the amount of wrinkles on the members' faces.
But thankfully, they were still good, and very high energy. After 20 years of playing the same songs, you would hope they'd be good, but they weren't just solid in a "we play these songs every night" type of way, but in a "we still love these songs that we play every night" type of way.
It would have been a major disappointment if they didn't care. For a band to survive through the crap-rock and indie-filled 2000s, playing the same horn-infused pop-punk that fell out of style quickly and became that screamo/emo bullshit bands have been hawking ever since is actually quite impressive.
Review continues on the next page.
