It was a bittersweet moment for Motion City Soundtrack fans in Charlotte on Wednesday as the band took the Fillmore Charlotte stage for one last performance.

This tour, appropriately titled “So Long, Farewell,” marks the end of an era for a generation that came up on the Vans Warped Tour in its prime. Energy was high, but slowly dwindled by night’s end as the crowd realized the group that defined them from their tweens onward was really gone for good.

Motion City Soundtrack made a name for themselves nearly 20 years ago thanks to thought-provoking pop-punk songs that somehow manage to be upbeat while sparking a dialogue on mental health. The band consists of singer and guitarist Justin Pierre, guitarist Joshua Cain, keyboardist Jesse Johnson, bassist Matthew Taylor and drummer Tony Thaxton. They released their official debut “I Am the Movie” in 2003 on Epitaph Records and have been releasing and touring nonstop ever since.

Until now, that is. Fans across the world were heartbroken to hear that the 2016 tour would be their last.

After sets by openers Great Big Pile of Leaves and Roswell Kid, Motion City Soundtrack hit the stage and charged into “Back to the Beat,” an impressive fast-paced jam that furiously set the tone for the rest of the evening. The group raged through their extensive catalogue of songs, playing fan favorites back-to-back without pausing or missing a single note. These guys have been performing together for two decades, after all. By this point, their live performance is a well-oiled machine.

The entire 90-minute show was really just for their beloved fans. Pierre rarely stopped to chat between sets (“I’m trying to get better about it,” he told the crowd sheepishly), but when he did, it was to profusely thank every person in the room for sticking with them til the end. “I hope you feel lots of feelings about feelings,” he quipped.

They’ve always had a way of bringing their music to life on previous tours, but perhaps the sound resonated so much more on Wednesday night because they group knew it was the final curtain call. Each song seemed driven by a manic energy, the band feeding off of the audience and the audience responding in kind. The Fillmore, maybe half full at the start of the show, practically shook as Motion City Soundtrack’s devoted fans screamed the words back to their heroes. Now that’s some serious band love.

They ended their regular set with “Everything is Alright,” possibly the most upbeat song ever written about having an anxiety attack. The crowd screamed the words back to them, negating the need for Pierre’s amazing vocals (he happily chimed in anyways). After the demands of the crowd took hold, they returned for a three song encore, the very last time Charlotte got to see them perform together as a group. Every fan knew how special this moment was, dancing ferociously and begging for more before the inevitable conclusion.

Motion City Soundtrack ended up playing an impressive 22-song set that spanned six studio albums. It was like a greatest hits concert from a band in its heyday. If you missed it, you missed a historic moment in the life of a band that defined a generation.


Setlist
1. Back to the Beat
2. Cambridge
3. Capital H
4. Her Words Destroyed My Planet
5. True Romance
6. It Had to Be You
7. Make Out Kids
8. Time Turned Fragile
9. L.G. FUAD
10. Last Night
11. My Favorite Accident
12. This Is For Real
13. Attractive Today
14. Broken Heart
15. Better Open the Door
16. When “You’re” Around
17. Hold Me Down
18. A Lifeless Ordinary (Need a Little Help)
19. Everything is Alright

Encore
20. Anything At All
21. Even If It Kills Me
22. The Future Freaks Me Out 

The Head and the Heart
The Fillmore
June 11, 2014

As the final notes from "Rivers and Roads" dissipated into the air of the sold-out Fillmore, the lights dimmed and The Head and the Heart's crew prepared the stage for a scheduled four-song encore. As the crowd cheered and broke into chants of "one more song!" the minutes ticked by. After roughly 10 minutes, the lights came on and a Fillmore employee took to the stage and informed the crowd the show was over. A few boos were heard as nearly 2,000 attendees shuffled out of the N.C. Music Factory venue.

On Twitter and Facebook, fans expressed their displeasure saying they were "bummed" and disappointed. The band took to social media:

Charlotte- please read this about our show tonight. We are so sorry to have been shutdown. We had many songs left. pic.twitter.com/aRthTnkGrg
- The Head & The Heart (@headandtheheart) June 12, 2014

Rumors quickly spread that there was a bomb threat and people blamed the venue for not doing more. If the rumors are true, why blame the venue for ending a show and getting people out of the venue? Did patrons want them to "yell fire" and get people to panic and run? Fans should instead be blaming the person who made the threat for ending the show early.

The Fillmore, on Thursday morning, issued the following statement:

"After the band's final song, an apparently intoxicated individual on our property outside the venue claimed he had put a bomb on the property. Charlotte police apprehended the individual, deemed the threat non-reliable but nonetheless, in the interest of safety, a decision was made to end the show without an encore."

If the show had continued, The Head and the Heart was scheduled to play a new song, "Springtime," "Summertime," "Let's Be Still" and "Down in the Valley." As it stands, fans were left a bit confused and dispirited.

Hooterfest
Chop Shop
June 7, 2014

From the opening notes of heavy rock band Butterfly Corpse to the closing set of humorous folk by Smelly Felly, the third annual Hooterfest benefit show for the Carolina Raptor Center showcased a variety of local music. Radio Lola offered blues-driven rock and No Anger Control brought punk angst, while Tattermask and Something Clever brought more heavy rock to the NoDa venue. Here's a slideshow from the event:

Jack White
The Fillmore
June 5, 2014

For the most famous - and possibly most important - rock 'n' roll star of his generation, Jack White's a bit of a crankypants. Not even his audience is unassailable.

"Some musicians don't care about this stuff, but I let the crowd tell me what to do," White says in a Rolling Stone cover story (which contained a few get-yr-dukes-up nuggets of its own). "There's no setlist. I'm not just saying the same things I said in Cleveland last night. If they can't give me that energy back? Maybe I'm wasting my time." Recall that White drew criticism back in 2012 when he walked off the stage at New York City's Radio City Music Hall, reportedly as a result of a lackadaisical audience. (White reportedly asked at one point during that show: "Jesus Christ, is this an NPR convention?")

If White does indeed feed off his audience, Thursday's sold-out crowd gave him plenty to draw from. (A solid portion of the crowd on the rail showed up not only hours before doors opened, but hours before the box office opened at noon. For a sold out show. One crew of four from Lynchburg, Virginia, camped out overnight to be the first in line and the first on the front row. Directly behind them, a woman who's catching nine dates of this leg of White's tour.)

Matrimony
Neighborhood Theatre
May 30, 2014

Charlotte's Matrimony performed at the Neighborhood Theatre on May 30 as a release party for the band's Columbia Records debut, Montibello Memories. Named after the street where singer/keyboardist Ashlee Hardee Brown and her brothers, drummer Jordan Hardee and multi-instrumentalist CJ Hardee, grew up, Hardee Brown noted the night was bittersweet as the home had been sold that very day.

As the band took the stage, smoke set off the building's fire alarm causing a premature evacuation of the venue into the NoDa streets. Soon after, singer/guitarist James Brown, Hardee Brown and CJ (with his banjo) were out front singing their song, "Flee or Fight," much to the delight of the attendees within earshot.

When the crowd finally filed back in, the band played a set filled with songs from the new album, as well as music from its two previous EPs.

Tegan and Sara, Lucius, The Courtneys
The Fillmore
May 19, 2014

In less capable hands, the idea of two frontwomen dressing alike with similar hairstyles might come across as a gimmick. With Lucius, the visual similarities take a backseat to the band's talents. Wearing black dresses and white tights that complimented their platinum blonde hairstyles, singers/multi-instrumentalists Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig took the stage and immediately impressed with harmonies so tight it sounded more like one singer than two.

Sandwiched on this night between the bar-band fuzz-pop of The Courtneys and the polished pop-rock of Tegan and Sara, Lucius was a stunning breath of fresh air.

Reverb Fest
Neighborhood Theatre
May 17, 2014

In January, I moved up to Charlotte from Columbia, S.C., where I was music editor of the city's altweekly Free Times. Not too long before I left, I started noticing billboards up around downtown Columbia, mostly by interstate on-ramps and major intersections, promoting Charlotte as a tourism destination. They'd show happy young yuppies lounging in the shadows of Uptown skyscrapers.

Charlotte's got a lot, they'd read.

(Ironically, billboards advertising Columbia's tourist hotspots, such as they are, started springing up in Charlotte after I'd moved up here. Quelle ironie!)

Columbia's a small town, and its music scene is similarly small. The benefit to that is, naturally, camaraderie, which was a comfort in Columbia. If someone needed support, he or she could fall back on fellow musicians. Benefits, like the ones that have sprung up in the wake of one local musician's brain cancer diagnosis, are common.

Though I've held residence in Charlotte since the New Year, I hadn't spent a lot of time in the city - I did some touring with some bands I play in, spent some time in my ancestral home of Boston, and pitched in as a spare hand at the Columbia alt-weekly I'd just left. It wasn't until mid-March when I spent any amount of time in Charlotte, let alone seeing its musicians. Those I had seen I was already intimately familiar with, and Creative Loafing readers probably would be, too: Bo White, Great Architect, Joint D≠, Hectorina, Junior Astronomers.

Which is what attracted me, as a relative newcomer, to Saturday's Reverb Fest. Its lengthy bill offered, to me, an opportunity to see a great number of bands - many of which I hadn't yet seen.

+++, Sleeper Agent, Wild Cub, Nostalghia
The Fillmore
May 15, 2014

If you went into Thursday night's show expecting to see a different side of Deftones singer Chino Moreno, you may have been surprised. While Moreno played 15 songs with his side project +++, they weren't always the mellow versions heard on the band's two EPs and full-length album. Moreno found plenty of time to, well, be himself.

+++ (Crosses) was one of four bands performing as a partnership between the Fillmore and 106.5 The End for the New Music Revolution events (this was the fourth). The series is a great way to check out new acts without breaking the bank - tickets were just $10.65. That, and if you don't like the band, chances are they won't be on stage for very long.