Review: United Nations holds a summit at Jewel’s Catch One

On Tuesday night, L.A.’s must-see live set of the week was at Jewel’s Catch One, the African American lesbian dance club in Mid-City. L.A.’s hipster elite was out in full force, including Este Haim, superproducer Jon Brion and all varietal of beard, selvedge denim and black-metal band tees. Graeme Flegenheimer, the night’s booker and promoter behind the old Church on York venue in Highland Park, paced the alleyway letting in last-minute VIPs.

The band onstage? United Nations, a side project from a 35-year-old singer who led the early-aughts screamo punk wave.

It’s been only a decade and some change since the band Thursday released its major-label breakthrough “War All the Time.” But that was enough time for its singer, Geoff Rickly, to go from mike-swinging, bloodletting emo hero to a salty scene wiseacre.

His current band, United Nations, has been an on-and-off side project for years, and even more than its brutal lockstep drumming or metal-singed guitar leads, United Nations is defined by an absurdist projection of its own importance (the band angered the actual United Nations for using the organization’s logo on its publicity materials, and early album cover art was simply the “Abbey Road” cover art with the Beatles on fire).

Now that its album “The Next Four Years” is finally out as a mock career-spanning box-set, the group is doing what greats like the Sex Pistols, Germs and the Fabulous Stains did before it: It’s gutting the self-regard of its fans and music scene. At Jewel’s Catch One, this gave United Nations a confrontational vitality that more earnest punk acts could never hope for.

Since its inception in the ‘70s, punk music has always wrestled with its own futility. Though hard-core is supposed to be oppositional music, no band today can seriously expect to change much of anything -- especially given the state of the contemporary music business. As a rock act gets older, screaming into the void feels like less and less of an accomplishment.

So Rickly and his collaborators (which includes members of hard-core bands Pianos Become the Teeth and fellow mid-aughts veterans Glassjaw) started acting like they’d already won.

It’s a great joke on the current music hype cycle from a singer who has been there and back. With the circa-2003 success of Thursday, Rickly was tasked with saving festival-sized rock music, leading a generation of depressed Bush-era teenagers while working in a genre that prizes harsh, ugly emotions.

As expected, that all tapered off. In 2013, Rickly admitted that a gunpoint robbery in New York left him bereft of “most of” his possessions, including rent money and medicine for his epilepsy.

Instead of throwing in the towel, however, he revived United Nations as an evil-twin version of Thursday -- one in which his own stardom is replaced by faceless bureaucracy, his lyrical tenderness replaced with bleak, self-critical humor (songs include “United Nations Find God,” “F#A#$”), and a context in which actual career success for United Nations feels like another twist on the band’s dark comedy about what success in music means.

“This is a song off our new album, it’s a box set from a mid-career punk band on its ascent into greatness,” Rickly said. They’ve seriously come close to achieving that with “The Next Four Years,” which on its own terms is a searing, heavy document of skilled players freed from their own career expectations.

But unlike most bands on the ascent, this is one that gets more difficult and acidic the bigger it gets. Let’s see what the next four years hold.

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