Double Penitentiary @ Bender's Tavern

Angular dance-rock bands: They're a dime a dozen.

I should know—I'm in one. So is the Advocate's news editor, Theo Romeo. Actually, we're in the same one. Our band is called Double Penitentiary, and what you're about to read is a review of our show at Bender's on Saturday, Feb. 20.

I'm not going to qualify my own band (although if I was, I would say we're 100 percent awesome). Instead, I'm going to review what, in my experience of being in bands (and I've been in a bunch of them), counts to a band: the crowd, the response, and how much fun I had.

The crowd was better than expected. There were two bands on the bill playing their respective first shows ever—Birds Of Ares and The Lonesome Death Of Jordy Verrill—and we ourselves were playing our second.

It probably helped, crowd-wise, that a bunch of the guys playing that night used to play in bands that were locally popular years ago, like the Blackout Pact and Grace Gale, if you remember those guys.

But we probably owed most of the draw to PowerPoint, the headliner. The band plays Minor Threat-style hardcore punk with lyrics entirely about working in offices (example: "The company matches my 410k." Now imagine that screamed), while wearing polo shirts and khakis, accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation helmed by one of the band's "interns." It's pretty hilarious.

Even during that raucous set (the band broke two mic stands and one of its guitars—conspicuously, no one stepped up to the band's request for a loaner), the crowd was pretty staid, but crowds at bars usually are. We got a lot of positive feedback after the set, though.

Considering one of the songs we played had been written earlier that day (it didn't have a name, and we just made up the lyrics as we went along), I was pleased with our performance.

My philosophy is, if you don't have to actually stop a song, people don't really notice if you fuck up a little—and we did. But the point is, we had fun.

And when you break down 600 pounds of gear, haul it, set it up, throw yourself at 30 minutes of performance, break the gear back down, haul it back home, and walk away with $35 apiece for the whole shebang—when you do all that, you need to have fun.

If you don't, it's just not worth it.