The Wake

In the Quest’s main room, platoons of pre-teens are waging a pop-punk war on sadness. But backstage, the mood is decidedly calm.

In a small and dingy dressing room, Motion City Soundtrack are awaiting their turn to go onstage. Flanked by empty pizza boxes, bottles of Newcastle and the nuclear-bomb-blast beats of the opening band, the guys in M.C.S. shuffle around, darting in and out of the stage doors like waiters in a cramped downtown-diner.

It’s a scene of sustained chaotic calm.

Jesse Johnson, keyboardist for the Minneapolis quintet, is quietly patching up his Moog-synthesizer with neon-green electrical tape. Bassist Matt Taylor is greeting various people backstage; only handshakes here though: the noise of the nearby stage drowns out virtually everything else.

The atmosphere backstage permeates with anxious anticipation. The band has seen the crowd, and they know it’s a big show.

“This room is bigger than the ones we’re used to playing,” says guitarist Josh Cain. “But we’re starting to book bigger shows with more and more people.”

Indeed. After a UK-stint with Blink-182 and a lengthy U.S. tour, the band has been experiencing a fast-paced popularity ride that has shot them straight-up to the precipice of pop-rock fame.

Tonight, however, the band just got plain lucky. Filling-in for cancelled headliner Sugarcult, Motion City Soundtrack has been catapulted to the evening’s main event. The Quest is packed to capacity. Hordes of jr. high and high-school kids - many of whom are clad Casablancas-style in mop-tops, too-tight t-shirts and tapered jeans - have turned the place into a pissed-off sardine-can.

These kids are Generation-Next, and they all seem to be angry and emotionally unstable. They’re the core of Motion City’s growing fan-base. For them – the die-hard fanatics, an angst-ridden army of emotion-slaves – Motion City Soundtrack literally is the musical score to their whirlwind lives.

“I love Motion City,” some local girl sitting with her dad tells me.

She’s part of the sugar-spiked emo-crowd that has invaded The Quest this evening.

“It’s like… they know what I’m feeling emotionally,” she says.

Her sentiment echoes that of the throngs of teenagers thrashing around in the mainroom-mosh-pit. Although the guys in the band deny being emo — “I don’t even know what ‘emo’ is,” says Cain — the raw passion in their performance justifies the fans’ mischaracterizations.

Like soul-saviors soaring through a rhythmic artillery barrage, the band seems to thrive on evoking the kind of organic gut-reaction that brought bands like Guided by Voices to their grief-glazed glory. Tonight, they’ve transformed the Quest into an emotive-combustion oven.

In the span of their hour-long set, the band emits unparalleled emotional-energy. Johnson, the calm, collected keyboard mechanic backstage now performs handplants on his synth while Cain, the cheerful, cherubic spokesman for the group, convulses in epileptic fury. It’s as though someone slipped these guys adrenochrome between set-breaks.

It’s a display in everything rock should be. It’s bratty. It’s loud. It’s fuck-you-but-your-mom-is-cool. And whether or not Motion City Soundtrack is emo, the fact remains: they’re the best rock group to come out of the Twin Town in a long, long, long time.