There’s a self-defeating narrative that tends to come out of me whenever a formative band of my teenage years breaks up, pill find and I’d like to dismantle it here with Motion City Soundtrack’s impending demise.

I often lead the eulogy off with a statement of who I was before the band in question came into my life. Since I’m apparently a glutton for self-deprecation, prostate I have offered up multiple examples for you to choose from:

• “I had a love of pop punk almost as insatiable as my love of cargo shorts, look of which I had a pair of for every day of the week.”
• “My friends were the kind of teenage philosophers that unironically watched Donnie Darko on a weekly basis, often followed by a dissection of its meaning.”
• “I once cavalierly gave a prom date a mix CD that opened with ‘Hands Down’ by Dashboard Confessional” (which, if anyone at home cares, is far too strong of a Warped Tour-era melodrama to be placed anywhere sooner than the second half of any standard issue high school mix CD)”

From there, in comes said formative band, out goes some of my unsightly pubescent tendencies, and I sappily assert how much the band meant to me over the years even though I kinda forgot to listen to that last record they put out. In short, it feels a little insincere in remembrance of the most eccentrically coiffured, hyper-literate synth rock band to come out of Minneapolis.

Sunday’s first of two farewell shows at The Paradise began in procession to a signing wall of favorite quotes, tearful paragraphs of thanks, and a few non-sequitur/obscene markings from fans not entirely sure how to say goodbye yet. Openers Let It Happen and Have Mercy certainly tried aiding the grieving process with serviceable takes on mid-aughts Warped Tour emo, but it’s rare to capture the kind of personality and manicured lyricism that made Motion City underdog heroes of the festival in its heyday.

Leading off with “Back to the Beat”, a fan favorite ode to breakdancing lovers dating back to 2000, singer/band mascot Justin Pierre and co. spanned sixteen years of broken hearts, feeling attractive on selective days, selling an Xbox to Jimmy down the street, and the optimism in being someone’s ‘favorite accident’ through a 22 song set. Rounded out by original drummer Tony Thaxton (who left the band back in 2013), the quintet played with an unnatural level of vitality for a band about to enter that murky “indefinite hiatus” stage of near-death, although every aspect outside of their playing suggested no plans for a reunion tour to follow. As such, the crowd responded heartily; torch songs like the ever gut-wrenching “Hold Me Down” came with as much deafening crowd participation as the band’s pogoing hits (highlight: the crowd erupting for the famed drum outro in “Time Turned Fragile”)

Of course, the fact was that we were congregated for a funeral of sorts and, although chants of “Dad!” started playfully as Pierre referred to his paternal instincts in the face of crowd-surfers, there was a certain pleading to the repeated dad cries in the set’s later half. Although they felt more like your friendly neighborhood record store nerds or the kind of friends you could probably watch Donnie Darko with without shame, Motion City Soundtrack ascended to an ideal parent role in the scene sometime over the past several years.

Despite some allegiance to pop punk and its penchant for oversharing, Pierre tackled anxiety, depression, and a desire to be better in his songs, adding a layer of witty self-reflection that normally evades the genre’s so-called best lyricists. Betty rocked the cow girl blues, Antonia sneezed when she saw bright lights, and the women Pierre loved were actually people versus targets of heartbroken aggression.

Closing out with their first (and still painfully relevant) hit “The Future Freaks Me Out”, the quintet are not only left with deserving pride over the last two decades of output, but proof of a rare kind of fanbase (myself very much included) that rallied around their positivity to guide them through their own past, present, and uncertain futures.

After all, Motion City Soundtrack didn’t live, get fucked up and die for anyone to feel anything less than alright in their company.

For additional photos from the show, check out our gallery below.