Half full
Sean Bonnette is an exceedingly normal dude. He’s kind of awkward and maybe a little shy. His voice had an average timbre as he profusely thanked those who came to see him perform at the Ottobar in Baltimore on Sunday night.
For those who know him as the quirky, pessimistic front man for folk-punk group Andrew Jackson Jihad, this normalcy may come as a bit of a surprise. Bonnette, the onstage epitome of sanity and gentleness, seemingly lacked the power to evoke the grisly, filthy, curse-ridden portraits of American life he describes in the band’s many two-minute tunes. Yet somehow when he opened his mouth to sing his first note, it was perfectly clear that Bonnette was the cynic AJJ fans know and love.
Bonnette clearly felt very passionate about the songs he was performing. He flailed and swayed in rhythm with every song, swinging from his toes to bent knees as his arm frantically strummed the up-tempo songs. He took on the higher-pitched voice affectation characteristic of all AJJ songs, making it easy to differentiate between his seemingly split personalities.
It is almost disillusioning to hear how different Sean Bonnette the person and Sean Bonnette the writer are. But maybe that is the point.
Contradiction and irony are the driving focus of Andrew Jackson Jihad’s music. Each song is powered by equal parts wit, violence and grit, overlaid with a strange optimism. He wields the words “God” and “gun” like weapons of truth in a scary time. Bonnette has a keen sense of the unjustness of life but also of the way humans totally ignore it, reflected in the almost cutesy way he can recite lyrics about death and destruction.
The audience adored him. Never before have I been in a crowd and heard so many punk guys screaming, “I love you.” The set list was entirely composed of requests — some he took at his merchandise table before the set started and some he just played as they were called out.
“The reason I got into music is because I love being yelled at,” he joked.
Shouted requests included his ballad “Free Bird,” which I’m convinced is titled such as to provide a deft response when someone ironically calls out for the cliched Lynyrd Skynyrd song of the same name. His songs, which usually feature an acoustic guitar even when played with a full band in a studio setting, translated well to the one-man-with-an-acoustic-guitar setting.
Bonnette also presented three new songs during his 75-minute set. With each one, he pleaded with the audience not to record it, insisting “they’re not fully realized yet” and calling them a sneak peek of what he will record when he heads into the studio this summer. He also covered “Canaries” by Kind of Like Spitting, a song whose style fits perfectly with the rest of the set.
Near the end of the set, Bonnette took a moment to deliver a sincere word of thanks to the Ottobar staff, specifically naming the manager and the sound tech, before launching into his final song, “Little Prince,” which starts with the line, “Hey everything, f— you.”
The contrast between the two personalities seems to be just an extension of the theme of so much of Bonnette’s music: Life is full of inconsistencies. Life can be dark, and it doesn’t always make sense, and most people are too oblivious to realize the full extent of the trouble. But through everything, he seems to suggest, we have to keep smiling.
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