By Barry Thompson

Lansdowne Street had a sort of an offbeat Norman Rockwell quality to it last Friday night. While Boston scene darlings, The Unseen, Big D and the Kids Table and Kicked in the Head played to the new hyper generation next door, a collection of disenfranchised youths from the early 1980s congregated to watch the Violent Femmes at Avalon.

Of course, the Femmes aren’t just for old people. The appeal of the Violent Femmes enjoys a 20 year longevity. This can be accredited to a sound which transcends easy classification, and therefore any tangible trend.

The catchy melancholic licks don’t hurt either. Avalon was treated to the band’s reformed original line up: Gordon Gano on lead vocals and electric guitar, Victor DeLorenzo on percussion, and Brian Ritchie on electric and acoustic bass, accompanied with a horn section headed by Sigmund Snopek who also on keyboards.

DeLorenzo’s drum set included a snare drum, a ride cymbal and what appeared to be a sawed off barrel, which was replaced with a floor tom for the “plugged-in” second half of their set.

Approximately two-hours long, the set consisted mostly of the more upbeat songs from the 1982 self-titled debut, with a few covers and eclectic Femmes favorites thrown in. It was a quarter of the way through the show when Ritchie paused to plug the release of a new double disk edition of the self-titled first album.

This would explain the lack of new material performed, as the crowd’s response was, far and away, largest for the old songs. One is led to wonder how it feels to have been a successful musician for two decades, forever to be remembered most fondly for the first song on the first album you ever put out.

In their case, the happy-go-lucky song, “Blister in the Sun,” played third in their set.

If it sounds like the Femmes are using nostalgia as a crutch, for lack of any worthwhile new material, it must be understood these were not merely recitations of the long ago recorded versions of the songs. These were extended, solo-laden, jammed-out versions of the old time tunes. This band is extremely affluent, musically, even if the appeal of their new music is a tad more selective. If the Femmes’ performance must be summed up in a sentence, Ritchie put it most eloquently himself, with the opening lines of one of the evening’s most heartfelt, tear jerking ballads, “When I say dance, you’d best dance, mother [expletive].”