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The Mighty Mighty Bosstones Deliver Career-Spanning Set

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones – Webster Hall – August 21, 2019

Where the Mighty Mighty Bosstones land on the list of Boston’s greatest musical exports is a subject of much debate. What isn’t up for debate is what the now-35-years-going-strong band did to help repopularize ska, marry it with sneering punk and further juice it with solid pop songcraft, occasionally enough to be radio-friendly and nationally known.

Funny thing, though, about the Bosstones: They don’t play like they’ve been at it through the feast and famine acceptance of what they do for nearly four decades, or that it’s been four, two or even one decade. No, Dicky Barrett and company play like it’s just as vital as it felt back then, when checkered ska found a like-minded dance partner with punk and elements of other genres, keeping just enough soul and even a little R&B in the bleating, blasting horn section to avoid a full-blown tip-over into grimy hardcore. The nine-piece—including, as ever, beloved skanking dancer and tour manager Ben Carr—roared into Webster Hall on Wednesday night, and if you were generous about a few extra facial wrinkles and gray beards, you could swear it was 1994, and they’d just come through Taang! Records on their way to mainstream success.

Last night their headlining set felt like an anthology, mixing the best-knowns (“The Rascal King,” “Someday I Suppose,” “The Impression That I Get”) with nuggets from all across their catalog. “A Reason to Toast” is from the early 2000s and “You Left, Right?” from late in that decade. “Hope I Never Lose My Wallet” (whoa!) goes all the way back to 1989, and “Kinder Words” is almost just as old. There’s newish music, too, and the band had a few to serve from last year’s While We’re At It, one of their most aggressive albums, along with covers they’ve been doing forever (the Wailers’ “Simmer Down”) and jaw-drop rarities (we see you, Murphy’s Law’s “Cavity Creeps”—with special guest Jimmy Gestapo, to boot).

That they don’t fuss a lot is not to be confused with businesslike. Barrett and friends charm the shit out of you even when they get on a tear and one song seems to become the bouncing, skanking, rocking, grinding next one before you’ve even caught a breath. The final song of the encore, “A Pretty Sad Excuse,” seemed to roll it all up into one, protracted ending: a laid-back, loping reggae bounce with a little soul thrown in that opened up to a big, bash-it-out finale. Had the place going apeshit, just the way the Bosstones always do it. —Chad Berndtson | @Cberndtson