Modern Baseball, Walter Etc., Chris Farren
Recommended
This event is in the past
Tue., Sept. 27, 8 p.m. 2016
Hawthorne Theatre
Hawthorne District (Portland)
$19 - $22
Whatever you think of “emo” as a descriptor, you can’t deny the irony that one of the genre’s fastest-rising bands is known for being funny. Humor in music is a delicate line to toe, but Philadelphia upstarts Jank seem happy to trample it: weed references abound throughout their catalog, recent EP Versace Summer features an absurdly earnest ode to a barely functioning bicycle, and their debut, Awkward Pop Songs, includes the not inaccurate lyric, “This is a rip-off of a Title Fight song.” Even the instrumentation hints at (perhaps unintentional) satire, as the technical, open-tuning guitar noodling fetishized by a niche subset of music fans is exaggerated nearly to the point of caricature. Sure, Jank’s appeal might be largely tied to the listener feeling included in inside jokes, but sometimes the best parties are the ones where only your closest friends show up. NATHAN TUCKER