Review: Together Pangea Gives Us The Energy We've Been Craving at Cafe du Nord in San Francisco
As a band who’s been revered in the garage-rock scene for over a decade, it would be normal to talk about how much they’ve changed or how much grander their shows have become. However, Together Pangea is a band that holds it down and keeps it real, despite their crown in the smaller punk scene. On Thursday night at Cafe du Nord in San Francisco, an intimate bar down on Market Street, Together Pangea, along with opening bands Reckling and Sad Park, brought the house down. They are a prime example that live shows are, above all else, about music and community.
After their sold-out record release show with Sad Park in Los Angeles’ The Troubadour, Together Pangea’s How to DYE tour kicked off in January, starting in Long Beach and eventually circling back to the west coast. Their touring party featured lots of legends from their home county, including The Paranoyds, Skating Polly, Tropa Magica, and Death Lens.
Openers Reckling and Sad Park, both bands hailing from Los Angeles like Together Pangea, had the responsibility of warming up the crowd before the main act. Despite this being a noisy, energetic lineup, the San Francisco crowd seemed a little shy at first. The crowd was young, but not so young that the majority of them didn’t have a drink in their hands. Reckling, fronted by Kelsey Reckling and joined by Together Pangea member Erik Jimenez, played first as the crowd started to flow into the venue. Sad Park was next, in which frontman Graham Steele greeted the crowd with confidence: “I want all of you guys to come closer– closer!”
The audience– dudes so tall they towered over you, couples dressed in all black, older dads, and the like– nervously huddled towards the stage, in which no barrier held them back from being arm's length away from the bands. As Sad Park opened with a fast-paced screamer, “I Should,” people danced and nodded like they were afraid they were doing the wrong thing. Steele, a punk show veteran, orchestrated the crowd to get loose: “Don’t be afraid to move around and jump around, okay? Even shake your ass a little.” With his approval, they played their first song off their latest album, “Awake,” and a mosh pit immediately unfolded.
With no barricade and a shorter stage, venues like Cafe du Nord are the perfect place for people to stage dive and crowd surf. The first contender did so during a Sad Park classic, “In My Head,” and as local shows sometimes go, they would continue crowd surfing through every other song throughout the night.
This was the energy needed for Together Pangea’s set. In the moments leading up to their set, members of the audience were itching for their performance to begin. The band, consisting of William Keegan, Erik Jimenez, and Danny Bengston, emerged from the side of the crowd, crawled up and rolled (yes, literally rolled,) onto stage with beers in hand. With this humorous and casual entrance, they opened with their latest album DYE’s lead single, “Marijuana.” The audience, at this point, needed no commands as they immediately started jumping and pushing on their own.
Although they were promoting their new album, DYE, on this tour, the band made sure to include fan-favorites from their older albums, Bulls and Roosters, Living Dummy, and of course, Badillac. They played the titular song off Badillac early on, sending everyone into an excited frenzy. The crowd screamed each word, and even hummed each riff, perfectly, echoing the Keegan: “Oh no you lied, oh no I tried, baaa-duuuh-LACK!”
They wrapped up their set with their most popular song off Badillac, “Sick Shit,” which spurred chaos into the crowd. Two, three people were crowd surfing at once (and yes, one of them was an aforementioned older dad). Those surrounding the pit found it hard to contain it, as moshers flung themselves in and out of the middle. As the song ended and the band stepped off stage, the crowd chanted “en-core! en-core! en-core!” with no hesitation. Together Pangea stepped back on stage, and ended the night with three encore songs for those who stayed. After covering The Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers,” they played the heavy and thrashing “Alive” from Badillac and the classic rock-esque 2021 single “Gates of Heaven.” The final encore was a perfect mix of fast and slow, pausing every few bars for the chorus, “I’m a badass motherfucker / Won’t you please just let me in?” concocting heaps of energy, sweat, and heat.
Throughout their set, Together Pangea never actually introduced themselves (“We are Together Pangea! This is our band!”), but to be fair, they didn’t have to. The most they did was, while pausing to tune their instruments, jokingly announce, “so we’re called AFI,” which got a couple laughs from the crowd. When you are so established in the garage-rock scene, the most you have to do for the crowd to love you is play well and play loud, two things in which Together Pangea did not disappoint.
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