Three Match Breeze

Nashville, TN pop punk sextet Diarrhea Planet played an opening set for fellow Nashvillains Those Darlins at Music Hall of Williamsburg, and if the point of an opening band is to warm up the crowd, then they failed miserably. Because by the end of their blistering set, the crowd was flat-out warn out. Both band and crowd were incredibly raucous from the start with shirtless bros abounding on the 20 degree night. I can’t really imagine anyone having more fun than being one of the four guitarists in Diarrhea Planet.

DP call themselves punks– and even went so far as to go on a rant explaining how anyone can be a punk, and then brought a guy onstage to explain what makes him angry (subway wrong-way walkers)– but their closest punk relatives are probably the mid-90’s wave of pop punk. Except DP are way faster and way louder. It’s a little incredible how a band with six members can be so tight. They even break down into mini-units, with the two stage-right guitarists breaking into choreographed guitar wagging.

Unfortunately, the same got-their-shit-together-ness can’t be said for large portions of the crowd, who’s “moshing” and “stage diving” so deserve the ironic quotes. It was more like  stage-lower-yourelf-slowly-into-the-crowd-ing. Seriously, it was kind of pathetic. And pathetic on both divers and the crowd tasked with catching the divers. The best dive of the night came from, unsurprisingly, one of the guitarists of DP. The heaviest one. He took a huge leap of the stage, and was barely saved from hitting the floor by the shocked crowd beneath him. And I mean “beneath” him as in physically below him as well as that they were not even worthy of catching such a magnificent rock showman. Diarrhea Planet are on their own world right now as far as live bands go, and everything in orbit can barely keep up.