By Juliana Schatz
Skinny jeans, tattoos and gouged ears populated the large group gathered in afterHOURS June 21 to welcome back the band, The Receiving End of Sirens (TREOS), one year after their last performance.
But while they may have had the opportunity to play large venues, playing Northeastern is a “fun treat” for the band, said bassist Brendan Brown.
“No matter where else we play, big or small, even when we play Avalon, we always know the most people when we play at afterHOURS,” he said. “I love it, it’s like practice.”
Kathleen Pendelton, a middler history major, attended the performance. She said she also went to last year’s TREOS show with a friend from another school.
There were several students from outside the city who attended the concert, including Brianne Roger, a junior media production major at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn.
“They actually came down to my school’s spring concert. I first saw them a few years ago, and I’ve been playing them on my radio show back at school,” Roger said.
TREOS played a set filled with new and older music. The band started the show with “Broadcast Quality,” an up-tempo crowd pleaser which fans rocked out to. The audience, filled with fans and friends of the band, enthusiastically responded to the music.
TREOS performed material from their upcoming album, The Earth Sings Mi Fa Mi. New songs included “Saturnus” and “Smoke ‘ Mirrors,” both of which were well-received.
After the audience was left chanting “one more!” TREOS returned to play “This Armistice,” which was most akin to the TREOS sound: hard rock sound, with melodic and passionate vocals.
TREOS has garnered a large fan-base by performing on major tours nationwide. They most recently played on MTV’s $2 Bill Tour and the Taste of Chaos Tour with bigger acts including The Deftones.
In addition to providing a familiar crowd, Northeastern’s campus is the origin of the band. Former Northeastern students bassist Brown, keyboardist and guitarist Nate Patteson and guitarist and vocalist Alex Bars. Bars reflected on the band’s beginning.
“I think I was eating a grilled chicken and cheese,” he said of the day at Levine Marketplace when he and Brown met drummer, Andrew Joseph Cook.
Cook, Brown and Bars each shared several semesters as students at Northeastern before the band’s success took off and they were not able to continue their studies. Together with Patteson, also from Massachusetts, they practiced and played on campus.
Brian Southall, the newest member of TREOS, recently joined as the band’s tour manager and guitarist.
Bars said the band went through many changes this year including, their experience writing The Earth Sings Mi Fa Mi at a llama farm in rural Connecticut.
“It was just a nice escape. I think we are fortunate as a band to have had the opportunity to spend that amount of time together, secluded from the outside world,” he said.
The band recorded the album in Washington, D.C. ,with producer Matt Squire, who has worked with bands like Panic! at the Disco. The album’s title holds a more profound meaning than one glancing through records might think. The “Mi Fa Mi” is abbreviated for the misery, famine, misery.
Bars explained on the origin of the phrase: “Mi fa mi is a philosophy that comes from a German mathematician Johannes Kepler, who in the 1600s theorized that each planet hummed a certain tune. And the earth, according to Keplar, sang ‘Mi, Fa, Mi.'”
Bars added how the theory was reflective of the state of society during that time and that the same holds true today.
The Earth Sings Mi Fa Mi is set to be released in August.
