Smoking Popes
At Metro (Victory)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in The Boston Globe, April 7, 2006

Four guys from Chicago who make the word “unassuming” seem woefully inadequate, the Smoking Popes spent a large chunk of the 1990s playing a deliciously tuneful brand of punk-pop that was all but ignored at the time. The live CD/DVD At Metro captures the band at a sold-out reunion gig this past November, where they seemed to decide that they were done being invisible. Despite the seven-year hiatus, there’s no sign that they’re at anything other than the top of their game; “Before I’m Gone” finds brothers Josh and Eli Caterer ecstatically squeezing out simultaneous guitar solos, and the band is muscular while protecting the melodies from being pummeled into oblivion. The songs are pretty much exclusively about love lost, anticipated and captured, and the Smoking Popes are versatile enough to pull off something as terse as “Writing A Letter” – seven lines, two chords, one key change and a breakneck tempo – and as verbose as “Pretty Pathetic,” a heartbreakingly self-pitying hard-luck story being sung to someone who may or may not be the person that the next song is going to be about. Both songs approach pop perfection from opposite sides, and At Metro offers plenty of others in between.

Back to reviews