Event Details
Date: Monday, January 14, 2013
Start Time: 7:00 PM
Event Type: Special Events, Concerts
Last Updated: December 17, 2012
Views: 26
Title FightLiving With LionsIn the middle of June 2011, hundreds of people converged on Redwood Art Space, a cramped storefront unit in an aging, out-of-the-way strip mall on the outskirts of Wilkes-Barre in the heart of northeastern Pennsylvanias Wyoming Valley. The crowd ranged in age from fresh-faced, guileless early teens to preening, collegiate twenties to paunchy, resigned forties, and in affect from angular-coiffed mall-punk to Polo- and Nike-bedecked straight-edge hardcore to menacing on-probation street tough. They had come to celebrate the release of Shed, the debut album by Title Fight, a local melodic hardcore-punk band formed in 2003 by bassist-vocalist Ned Russin, drummer Ben Russin, and guitarist-vocalist Jamie Rhoden when the three were in middle school.In the intervening eight years the band had added a second guitar player, Shane Moran, and released a succession of demos and EPs. At some point, roughly around the release of Kingston, their 2008 Lifetime-inspired seven-inch named after the Wilkes-Barre suburb where they were raised, Title Fight had started to get busy. At first, the exposure had been regional their pictures in the city paper, their local shows drawing notably large numbers of kids. Eventually, it had gotten bigger than that. By the end of 2009, they had secured slots on tours with the likes of New Found Glory and H20, some of the biggest names on the uppermost echelon of modern punk rock. They had, in other words, embarked upon a path that would lead inexorably to their becoming a big, nationally known band.And yet here they were in the midst of such an ascent, at a point in their lives when the trappings of celebrity are at their most alluring here they were marking the release of their debut full-length by playing a self-promoted show in a drab, cigarette-smoke-stained erstwhile retail space with no air conditioning. They would perform that night between four sweating gypsum walls and under a sagging asbestos ceiling in a room whose square-footage would allow admittance of no more than a couple of hundred paying customers, and whose floor plan lacked a bar, a VIP area, and even so much as a ladies bathroom. Appearing as openers on the evenings bill were Cold World, War Hungry, and Dead End Path, homegrown hardcore bands specializing in high-volume ferocity inspired to the point of slavish obsession by the legendary New York City hardcore scene of the 1980s.To understand Title Fight, what makes them special, what inspires uncommon loyalty within their rapidly growing fanbase, one must understand, first, why the Shed release show could happen and, second, why it did happen. At no point in their first eight years had Title Fights four members lost touch with the DIY hardcore scene in which they had come of age. Nor had they even momentarily ceased to regard themselves as card-carrying members. In return, the DIY hardcore scene, a subculture with an unmatched aptitude for detecting hidden agendas, threw its support behind the band to an extent that is frankly unprecedented.