Destroy Boys at House of Independents
June 5, 2022
So, it’s been a couple of weeks since my Devo/Dry Cleaning double show night. Like Dexter Morgan, I’m getting antsy for my next live music “kill”.
I’ve been flipping through BandsInTown listings. Every night, in the greater New York Area, there are literally hundreds of concerts happening in all kinds of venues across the City. I tend to hear about most of the ones I might be interested in, but nothing was jumping out at me.
I thought, there’s gotta be SOMEBODY playing in nearby Asbury Park worth taking a shot at. Twenty minutes away, if the show sucks I can still get home to watch a hockey game or something. I checked the major venues there, including The Stone Pony, Wonderbar, even Asbury Lanes. Nothing. I tried the House of Independents, which gets some good but quirky or dated bands. I’ve seen The Bongos, Dramarama, The Grip Weeds, and some others there.
What do you know? They’ve got a California-based punk band, Destroy Boys, playing tonight. Never heard of them, but when I give a listen via Spotify, they sound pretty good. And I bet that live, they’ll sound even better. Giddy up!
When I get to the House of Independents, there’s a line waiting to get in wrapped around the building for two blocks. It looks like a few hundred high-school kids dawdling their way back into class after a fire drill or a bomb scare. I don’t see any other Geezers, and I’ve got almost fifty years on most of this crew. Uh-oh.
But wait! The opening act, whose name I can’t find anywhere, is a young, four-piece rock band that isn’t half bad. And, they pull off a terrific cover of the Buzzcocks’ classic, “Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)?” Of course, they introduce the song as “You know, the one from Shrek 2” since nobody else here was born early enough to know who the Buzzcocks might have been. But still, good work on a relatively brief set.
The second band up, Scowl, was a thrash band whose star-spangled lead singer mostly used her time onstage to incite ultra-violence in the mosh pit. This crowd moshed it up like Hell’s Angels at Altamont. Jesus, these people were rough and scary and AGGRESSIVE. I thought for sure there would be death and destruction on the concrete floor, so I ducked for cover and played defense. No music worth mentioning from Scowl, but they did get the crowd juiced up, I guess.
Which brings us to Destroy Boys, a three-piece band plus a bass player. They carry on a proud musical tradition of a style driven by other California bands like Agent Orange and X. In fact, lead singer Violet Mayugba sounds a LOT like Exene Cervenka from X.
Destroy Boys has a ton of energy, and passionately belts out songs about Mean Girls, relationships, identity and social consciousness of our times. They put on a terrific show, and the crowd danced and pogo’d to the whole shebang. The mosh pit was a bit more civilized than before, so nobody got killed.
The DBs dedicated one song and mosh pit to “non-binary people” there. I didn’t have any idea what that meant so stayed glued to the side wall. It sounded like something I once learned in Algebra but nothing resonated. Whoever qualified seemed to enjoy it and appreciated the DB’s shout-out and support.
Here’s a sampler of the best material from the Destroy Boys (according to me). It overlaps pretty heavily with the show’s actual playlist. Check it out.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5gnRxpAVALhvrodXJKN3yl?si=-W2qwGFySVS7PkaIICYzWw
Really great show and music from a band I didn’t know.