‘Animal House,’ emo style
Forrest Kline, the frontman of Huntington Beach’s Hellogoodbye, dedicated one of the songs in his band’s hourlong set Friday at the Wiltern to anyone in a fraternity. Given that Hellogoodbye is an emo band (an exceedingly popular one, with a single on Top-40 radio), and emo was invented by the type of arty outsiders likelier to get beat up by frat guys than to pound beers with them, surely Kline was joking.
Except maybe he wasn’t. The Wiltern’s stage was set to resemble a nondescript living room; wide picture windows flanked a couch from IKEA. And when the four members of Hellogoodbye sauntered out onstage, they did it with help from 15 or 20 friends, who sat around the ad hoc animal house while the band played, drinking beer and snapping cellphone pictures of one another. More than an emo show, the scene looked like an end-of semester fraternity blowout, an impression that only increased when the band covered “Fight for Your Right,” the Beastie Boys anthem that serves as the frat boy’s rap-rock rallying cry.
Hellogoodbye is emo’s premier party band, the clearest example yet of how far this once-obtuse music has come from its decades-old roots in the brainy Washington, D.C., hard-core scene. Emo used to be about the dark glamour of depression. Then it was about the misery girls inflict upon boys. Kline’s songs, by comparison, are pretty cheery; over tuneful, synthed-up guitars, he describes hanging out with his girlfriend, and how her mom once “caught us eating ice cream” in her room “at 3 in the morning.”
At the Wiltern, no one in the capacity crowd seemed to worry too much about this transformation. Young women clutching Burberry bags swooned; middle-school kids with their parents in tow bounced in place. And when Hellogoodbye played its big hit, “Here (In Your Arms)” -- an emo version of Cher’s “Believe” -- the place went ballistic, as if spring break had finally arrived.
