#club garibaldi

Yet chances are you’ve never heard of them. When the band played Summerfest two years ago in an opening slot for Taking Back Sunday, the crowd of teenyboppers, scenesters and hip kids cared more about the fact that one of their songs was covered by the band Bayside than any song the band actually themselves played. (And they also sat down the whole time. Summerfest needs to get rid of those benches – another matter entirely.) In the annals of Midwestern rock and roll, the Popes are a footnote, a one-hit wonder without a real hit whose best splash was a 37th place finish on the Heatseekers chart, which is the Billboard way of telling you that you did pretty well for a band nobody gives a shit about.

So here’s the thing about the Smoking Popes: they should be bigger than they are. And pretty much everyone in the shoulder-to-shoulder Club Garibaldi crowd Friday night understood this, as the band joyously ripped through the entirety of Born to Quit in advance of the album’s re-mastered re-release.

The Smoking Popes aren’t a typical pop punk band, and Born to Quit isn’t a typical pop punk release – there’s a twinge of sadness to singer Josh Caterer’s crooning voice (which is in itself a reason why the self-loving Morrissey would like the band in the first place), and whereas other punk bands turn breakups into either bitterness or quaint heartache, the Popes turn them into legitimate sorrow. Even on a ludicrously simple song like “Just Broke Up,” the chorus of which is literally a repetition of the phrase “just broke up with my girlfriend,” there’s an emptiness that you can really feel. And their greatest song, “Need You Around,” pleads so woefully and constantly to be loved that there’s a real gut-wrenching black hole in there. Whether or not you think breakups constitute hard-hitting rock music is another matter, but the Popes play loud and fast and really well.

The band played other material during their headlining set – more than half the set list was composed of songs from albums other than Born to Quit – but Born to Quit was the centerpiece, the raison d’etre. It opened the set with a ten-song, thirty-minute barrage, and its album cover (redesigned to resemble stained glass in the wake of its re-release) hung from the lights as a banner behind drummer Neil Hennessy during a typically energetic show (their third in Milwaukee in the last two years) that belied the newfound paunch of the brothers Caterer (Josh, Matt and Eli).