My friend Kevin and I hit the Washington Street Strip in Hoboken (like the Vegas Strip with fewer adults and casinos) around 8:00, and we didn’t want to show up for the 8:30 concert on time, cause we’re not losers, plus we didn’t want The Wrens to think we were too anxious, so we popped into a nearby bar with a chalkboard outside advertising $3 margaritas. This is important to the review not because we ended up getting drunk and stage diving or some predictable “oh-that’s-where-this-story-was-going” crap, it’s important because every minute the two opening acts were onstage, we were angry we’d chosen to see them and not to continue chewing on frozen strawberries.

We arrived at 8:50, not fashionably late enough, and by “fashionably,” I mean that the opening band, The Amber Jets, was not good. In addition to expending about three calories of energy moving during the entire set, the lead singer was distressingly old-looking—the word “Amber” perhaps referred to the singer’s having been trapped in amber for thousands of years before being reconstructed using the DNA of a frog that lacked lilly-pad presence. They finished at 9:45ish, and we found a place to sit at 9:46ish, but before we’d come up with a pun on Amber Jets that sufficiently described their mediocrity—“Lame-ber Jets” was about as close as we got—The Milwaukees hit the stage and we were instantly deafened and still are. It was the loudest non-Ozzfest performance I’ve ever been subjected to, and granted, we were right by the speaker, but there’s never a need for a wannabe Eve-6 / Jimmy Eat World foursome to ever be unleashed on the public anyway, much less at nine billion decibels per square suck. While the rest of the crowd pretended to be rocking, Kevin and I were sitting and had our fingers in our ears, which was less a statement against the band than it was pure survival instinct. So the Milwaukees weren’t good. And they were from Jersey, not Milwaukee. And Robin Yount wasn’t even in the band, which was bullshit.

So finally, the Wrens hit the stage at 10:50, then proceeded to set up their own instruments and undergo a sound check that took literally twenty minutes, prompting Kevin’s comment, “more like the Whens!” They kept starting songs and riffs and people kept cheering, but no one could tell if it was the actual concert or still the sound check; if Charlie Kaufman had written it, it would have been brilliant. Funnier still, the guitarist was, oddly, the only member of the band who didn’t look like a fortysomething guitar teacher, and I grew convinced that their new single, Let’s Start By Learning The Peter Gunn Theme, has got to be in the works. Finally, after singing the opening thirty-second track from the Meadowlands album (without the crickets, which made me instantly yell for my money back) the band ripped into the set at nine billion decibels, and the concert was off and running, or should I say, flying, because, you know, that’s what wrens do.

The venue was phenomenally fan-friendly and the band took full advantage; at one point, Kevin Whelan pulled a drunken frat-looking kid onstage and let him sing about half of Faster Gun and he absolutely nailed it, which was awesome enough, then Whelan punctuated it with the comment, “I’d like to thank my dad for coming up onstage and singing with us.” Later, Whelan’s triumphant proclamation, “we are from fucking New Jersey!” was greeted with massive applause and cleared up any doubts about the hometown origins of the band whose two albums are called The Meadowlands and Secaucus and were playing in Hoboken at a benefit for Jersey Beat Magazine. Needless to say, they owned the crowd from the opening millisecond well through Happy and Hopeless, their two best songs, and some scorchers from Seacaucus, which they delivered masterfully. After the last song, the band left the stage, and, since there was no backstage and nowhere to go in the packed room, they just sort of walked through the crowd, then back onto the stage for the encore, obliging shouts of “She Sends Kisses!” by playing the pseudo-ballad at nine billion decibels, then shooting into a finale at twelve billion decibels to cap off an absolutely stu-Wren-dous set. As much as I love the introspective, bitterly subdued Meadowlands album, hearing The Wrens live gave me a new perspective on just how angry and bleak they can be while still rocking harder than any other band on earth named after a type of bird. Unless, of course, you count the Fabulous Thunderbirds.

Overall, on my Indie-Concert-O-Meter, The Wrens’ performance at Maxwell’s scores three ironic T-shirts out of four. Well done, you adults!