Photo credit: Sarah Rudderow

The Districts
Baby’s All Right
Brooklyn, NY
December 2

Time and time again, The Districts prove themselves to be one of the most exciting young rock bands playing today. The Pennsylvania quartet, who formed in high school and spent years playing in small clubs and DIY spaces before seeing their star gradually rise with the release of their 2015 album A Flourish and a Spoil, appear to be gearing up for the next step in their career. Having spent much of the year working on new material, the band decided to let out some pent up aggression by embarking on a fall tour that saw them returning to those kinds of intimate venues, which seemed the most natural place for the group to unveil a batch of fresh songs and what felt decidedly like a band that was growing up before our eyes.

That newfound maturity could be spotted at little moments all throughout their set at Brooklyn’s Baby’s All Right. That’s not to say that The Districts are all of a sudden a bunch of dads – with all of the members just above the legal drinking age, there’s still plenty of youthful angst and energy at play on stage – it’s that in all aspects they now truly sound like a band, and a damn good one at that. On new songs like “Violet” and “Point” the band introduced just the right touch of pop punk into their reverb-soaked garage rock style, displaying a newfound cohesiveness along with frontman Rob Grote’s ever growing songwriting skills. They also continue to rework arrangements for old favorites, most notable of which came during the usually stumbling singalong coda of “Long Distance,” a track that initially appeared on their recently reissued self-released debut album Telephone. The band altered the vocal line into a harmony-laden build-up that combined a ‘70s anthemic quality with dirty Pixies-esque alt rock.

As always, though, the Districts distinguishing quality comes in their performance. There’s something about it that goes beyond passion, or intensity, and points to a deep connection with the audience and with music itself. It’s no surprise anytime you pack a band like this into a venue too small for them that the audience is on the edge of their seats from the get-go, waiting for the right chance to explode. And explode they did. The group made the choice to move usual show-closer “Young Blood” to early in the set, and as the song entered the slow building groove that dominates its latter half, there was a palpable tension in the room. Propelled by a relentless bass drum from Braden Lawrence and Grote’s scorched vocal pleas the song sent the crowd into a frenzied and cathartic mosh pit as it reached its fever pitch, opening up an energy in the audience that didn’t let up the rest of the night.

The only downside of the show was its relative brevity, and many of the bands best tunes, including slower acoustic numbers like “6 AM” and “Fat Kiddo” which were maybe a little too somber for the venue, were left off the 14-song setlist. They closed with another slightly reworked older tune, “Funeral Beds,” which continues to be one of Grote’s most enduring pieces of songwriting. There’s something powerful about a couple hundred people drenched in sweat jumping around and singing along. This is a band that started out exceptionally talented for their age, but this tour proves that they’re really just exceptionally talented. Full stop. It’s hard to see a path for them that doesn’t lead to bigger levels of success, so the opportunity to see them in a venue like this is one to be cherished.