Now you see them, now you don’t: Sunny Day Real Estate re-reunited for a American tour, including a show at the Ogden Theatre on Monday. Photo courtesy of Sub Pop Records.
Fifteen years ago, “Diary” defined the parameters of modern emo: plaintive vocals, melodic guitars chopped up by cascading tempo changes, almost upsettingly personal lyrics. But before the band could even fully realize their impact on modern rock, frontman Jeremy Enigk found Jesus, guitarist Dan Hoerner found the rural life, while drummer William Goldsmith and bassist Nate Mendel found Dave Grohl.
Less than two years after their debut in the hyper-fertile Seattle landscape, the band had broken up and left their fans with “LP2,” their enigmatic, pink-covered sophomore album. Though the band reunited (without Mendel) in 1998, “Diary” and “LP2” remain among emo’s highest watermarks.
Performing Monday night at to an overwhelmingly thirtysomething crowd, the original lineup of Sunny Day seemed genuinely grateful to be together again and making music. Sweetly thanking the audience and rewarding them with song after song from their pivotal first two albums, the band truly understood what is expected from a reunion tour.
But the spirit has changed a bit — what was once defined as a sound that spoke to the youthful angst of feeling things for the first time, Enigk’s increasingly-strained voice and the band’s honed musicianship now tell a story of lessons learned, truths discovered, pain remembered as raw but tempered by the passage of time. Moving deftly from the harder, more angular catalog of “Diary” to the melodic sounds of “LP2,” the musicians of Sunny Day Real Estate have, like their fans, grown up.
Nowhere was the band’s collective growth more evident than in their singular new song, which brought together the divergent sounds of the seminal first albums and sharpened them with more than 10 years of breakups, reunions and retooling. The “new” song, usually the signal to grab a beer or hit the bathroom, proved in this case to be a sign of promise as well as a progress report.
The encore performance of “48” closed the show out, with Hoerner telling the Ogden, “There are no words, but I’ll keep saying thank you anyway.” But it seemed that the crowd, still chanting for more after the encore, were the grateful ones.
Any reunion show can provoke nostalgia but with their set, Sunny Day told the complex history of their own rise and fall, from the perspective of a decade and a half of experience. For many of the people in that Monday night crowd who grew up listening to Sunny Day Real Estate and their many emulators, the band was telling their story as well.
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Cassandra Schoon is an assistant manager at and a regular Reverb contributor.
