Concert Review: Best Behavior Sing To The Badder Ones At Mercury Lounge

You ever wish you could run up into your high-school and trash the principal’s office. Maybe, tear up the lockers of every bully that humiliated you in front of the class. Even go into the parking lot, and do donuts on the gym fields that you ran so horribly as you “tried” to look athletic. Alright, I know I am getting super specific, but Best Behavior’s Mercury Lounge show was a sonic play into every moment you want to badly behave.

Sometimes, we believe bad behavior is stemmed from mischief or malice, but, at its core, the idea is the defined by rule breaking. It is about every moment when a rule did not satisfy your need for justice, peace, healing, and even love. From their newest single “Say” to tracks from their debut, Good Luck Bad Karma”, every song wan about the excuses, rules, and rebellions we stir when we feel our voice, especially in a relationship, is being sided as weaker. From “Bad Habit” to “Buried Mountain”, lead singer Alex Gruenberg emanated every single moment when you KNEW you were right, better, smarter, and even kinder, but still managed to be the “bad guy” or, at least, the one that paid. Hence, my previous “high-school” image is not off in how you will feel at a Best Behavior concert. They are garage rock at its purest form: guitar melodies always carry a sense of burgeoning tension that swindle in psychedelic effect, drumrolls sound like punches to a wall, and the bass sounds like the electric heartbeats you feel even in your ears from how frustrated/ fascinated you are by a situation. In essence, garage rock/ pop was born form every angsty teen that needed a domain to save others and himself from their fostered social disappointments. Of course, lyrically, Best Behavior have graduated from teen angst, but like in “No Friends” or “Backwards Explanation”, you see angst never leaves you. Instead, the difference between teens and adults, is that we lose our outlets to express our anger/ felt indifference, and let it build into our relationships like ticking emotional time-bombs that explode over the dumbest reasons. We bury our hearts so much that, when give them to someone, they have a little dirt. Best Behavior captures the dirt and dastard of garage/ indie rock by having a performance filled with scattered adrenaline.

Watching Best Behavior is like seeing sparks shoot out of a burning television. Chords buzz with images, while lyrical fire blazes through the once, epicenter of your feelings: love. Gruenberg is a dynamic performer that guides the band in roughhousing through the stage as if they were brawling with their instruments. Sweat and dissent drip from their foreheads while they sonically exemplify youthful strife. Meanwhile, Gruenberg’s voice feels like a cross between a SoCal surfer and a rebel rioter. On one hand, he surfs through notes like an oncoming wave, but then lights them as if that wave were actually a punch. His meshing of a lax style with emotional tension helps show that garage rock is just the chiller, but still raucous younger brother of classic rock n’ roll. For More Information On Best Behavior Click Here.