Bad Moves, Paranoid Style, Truth or Dare
Songbyrd, Washington DC, May 8, 2025
Trying to get better at writing up my shows.
I saw the local power pop/punk-pop bands Bad Moves and Paranoid Style last night at Songbyrd with some folks called Truth or Dare opening.
Truth or Dare were fun, kind of a cross between punk-pop with some funny hair metal influences (like, musically, not aesthetically — but some bits sounded like they could have been borrowed from Twisted Sister; that's not a complaint in this context).
The Paranoid Style is Elizabeth Nelson's band; she is better known as a writer (pieces in the NYT, Washington Post, a lot of outlets on culture and music). I never quite got her music but I like her writing so I follow her on social media. She reminds me a lot of Elvis Costello and how I can appreciate but never truly loved his work; she's very prolix and likes to cram a lot of lyrical ideas into a song so quickly that you can't always appreciate them. I think her work is more recognized by rock critics, of whom she is one, than a mass audience. Power pop legend Peter Holsapple (dBs, Continental Drifters, R.E.M.) was guesting with them, which was impressive. He is a member of the band for their most recent 2024 record,
The Interrogator. The best of the songs last night was "
Print the Legend" from the new album on Bar/None Records.
Bad Moves keep getting more and more fun live; it's sad that the band is winding down to take on other projects. They have two more shows lined up in July in Baltimore and back in DC at the Black Cat for a final farewell. Their catalogue has grown and more of the songs went back to early stuff I didn't know, but many of their songs are so insistently catchy that you don't need to know them all to get caught up in the riffs. They are very DC; singing about real estate ("Eviction Party"), taking the 54 bus, participating in local activism ("Hallelujah"), or just rocking out, like "Cool Generator" from their 2018 record
Tell No One. Somehow, a bratty 2016 single "
The Verge," went semi-viral and remains their most popular song, But a lot was from 2024's
Wearing Out the Refrain, which will serve as an admirable swan song for their ten-year run.
Watching the band is always fun, since they have four members and three of them sing lead, ping-ponging between guitarist (and local music promoter and booker) David Combs, rhythm guitarist Katie Park, and bassist Emma Cleveland. A single song might have harmony vocals, a male lead, a female lead, and all four members including drummer Daoud Tyler-Ameen (known to NPR listeners) singing en masse. Honestly I like Park's leads most, but it's fun when they all sing.
As a comment, while power pop and punk-pop are stereotypically genres dominated by straight white dudes, all of these bands are mixed-gender, mixed-race, mixed-orientation. DC is an inclusive local music scene!
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/09/2025 10:50AM by zwirnm.
