Photos and review by NOTES FROM VIVACE

LOS ANGELES – Vial, the three piece bratpunk band from Minneapolis, Minn., rushed onto the El Cid stage to start their set. That’s right, they didn’t walk casually from the stage entrance like most bands do. They ran onto the stage as their adoring fans, who had lined up early on Sunset Boulevard, and were now pressed up close, screamed their approval.

Teenagers with Xs marked on both their right and left hands were up front. Tweens were off to the side with their parents. The older crowd (maybe parents of some of those teenagers) were politely in the back. Someone yelled out to bassist Taylor Kraemer, “I love your hair.” Kraemer responded, “I love you, whoever said that.”

The band released their second album at the end of March called burnout and has been on a 22-city tour to support the album, starting out with a record release party in their home town, and ending at Punk Rock Bowling. The album is 10 songs and comes in at a uniquely short 20 minutes. A song such as “two-faced” clocks in at 3 minutes 12 seconds while a song called “chronic illness flareups” is just 37 seconds.

At El Cid, the band put on an 18-song clinic that had the crowd in the palm of their hands. The pop-punk song “bottle blonde” got the crowd singing to the quick hit lyrics. There were screams of approval to the fun loving ode to soup, “broth song.” The band most definitely loves good food as Kraemer’s bass had the words “Fish Fear Me” written on it. You knew the audience followed the band closely when it did the Nirvana cover “Territorial Pissings.” The band told the crowd that everyone knew what chant was needed to start the song and the crowd immediately started yelling “Piss! Piss! Piss!”

During the set, an amusing tour tale was told. At their Toronto tour stop, Kraemer had an unfortunate encounter, “We stepped out of our disgusting van, sweating and stinky. And we look up at the venue, which is three flights of stairs. No f*cking elevator. And I immediately feel something on my shoulders and my brand new skirt. I look down, brown and white bird shit . . . f*ck the birds of Toronto.” Laughter and then cheers arose from that story as the band launched into “friendship bracelet” with drummer Katie Fischer starting the music off with pounding drum beats.

Having fun in the mosh pit was expected of the fans. Early in the set, the band had the crowd repeat the following pledge to each other, “Dearest friend, you look good tonight. I hope after tonight, we can still be dearest friends, after I break your nose and steal all your teeth.” Then later in the set, the band had the crowd separate to the sides of the venue, leaving a wide gap down the middle. Why? The two sides rushed each other like the clash of opposing medieval fantasy armies. Did anyone break their nose or have their teeth stolen? Probably not, there was too much fun being had for hospital / dental visits to ruin the night.

The song “Piss Punk” closed out the set. The intense beats had fans rushing the stage for one last mosh pit, “I can do the things that you do, and I can do them better than you. Do the things that you never thought that any fucking woman could do.” But back to the band having the crowd in the palm of their hands . . . guitarist KT Branscom stopped the song and told the crowd, “I need it to be completely and utterly silent.” The mosh pit ended and the venue went completely silent. “You guys are good at that.” A couple nervous laughs occurred, “Shh!!! No laughing. At the count of three, are you guys ready, one two three.” The crowd yelled back the chorus “You’re so boring” as they restarted jumping and dancing with abandon.

An encore was demanded and provided. The band played a song that they said hadn’t been played in three years. Some in the crowd knew exactly what it would be and screamed out “DIY / Or Die.” Afterward, as the crowd was hustled by security to the El Cid patio (this was an early show and a later show was on the schedule), a conversation between two fans was overheard, “I had so much fun” with the reply, “Me, too.” Follow Vial on social media.

Opening up for Vial were San Diego-based band (and west coast tour mates) Rain on Fridays and Los Angeles-based band Suzie True. Vial joined Rain on Fridays for the song “Slumber Party,” which is about not being the cool kids. It can be considered a bookend to the Vial song “friendship bracelet.” Their sound is fuzzy with garage rock influences and perhaps some painful teen memories, “Raise your hands if you’ve cried this week.”

Suzie True wowed the early crowd with their vocal screams and dynamic, as well as aerobic, stage show. Lead singer Lexi McCoy proclaimed her unabashed love for . . . “I love chocolate milk.” And exemplified the DIY attitude of many a Los Angeles band, “I feel like I was looking at a deep fryer and then I looked up and I was here.”

Vial setlist. two-faced, falling short, bottle blonde, broth song, Black Sheep (Metric cover), Ego Death, apathy, friendship bracelet, Roadkill, Territorial Pissings (Nirvana cover), ur dad, chronic illness flareups, Mr Fuck You, Planet Drool, Embryo, Rough, Piss Punk. Encore: DIY/Or Die

Rain on Fridays: evolutionary peak of boredom, Idiotic Defense, Cry It Out, Hey Man, Phono, Keep Yr Chin, Wasa, Slumber Party

Related

HOUSTON – Saturday marks four years since George Floyd was killed, kicking off protests as tensions over racism and police violence boiled over across the country.

His family and the community remembered him in Houston on Saturday near the basketball courts at his childhood home in the Third Ward.

“Racism’s still here and we’re all fighting for equality,” his brother Rodney Floyd said. “One thing he stood for is unity.”

In May 2020, former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, which was captured on video that’s been seen by millions.

A jury later convicted him of murder.

“It’s more painful every year because it’s another year that I’m without him,” Floyd’s sister Latoyna said.

Attempts to make meaningful change in his name haven’t made it far.

Earlier this year, President Joe Biden called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which is a bill his family would like to see enacted because “it’s about the generations behind us.”

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee reintroduced the bill earlier this week. It would hold law enforcement accountable for misconduct in court, improve transparency, and reform police training and policies.

Floyd’s family won’t give up.

“We’re keeping his name alive and we’re going to do this forever, until we’re gone,” Latonya Floyd said.

Opinion editor’s note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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Recently when I drove down West River Parkway in Minneapolis, a car tailed me, then passed, barreling toward downtown way too fast to notice the flowering trees or see the hawk hunting from a dead limb. The same thing happened last week. And the week before.

Yeah, I’m that guy who drives the speed limit on the parkway — 20 miles per hour. It seems to really infuriate the drivers who want to use the parkway as a commuter highway.

Minneapolis’ 30-odd parkways are called parkways because they’re actually part of a park. They run through park land and are managed by the Park and Recreation Board as public space for you and your family to play, forage, picnic, walk, cycle, skate and scoot.

But in the last few years a lot has changed to make some of the parkways feel more like highways.

The parkway I’m most familiar with — West River Parkway — has essentially become a commuter route for impatient families going to work, school, the airport or downtown, and hurried Amazon drivers making their deliveries. Few drivers heed the 20-mph speed limit. Very few slow to view an eagle passing overhead, and it’s rare that one would stop for a dog-walker in a pedestrian crosswalk.

Meanwhile, e-bikes, e-scooters and other e-rolling devices are increasingly popular and changing how it feels to take a family stroll through the park. The park board has set a 10-mph speed limit on bike paths, but if you’ve been on an electric bike you know that speed barely lets you feel a breeze. Very few people using an e-anything are going only 10 miles per hour. It can feel really scary when an e-bike whizzes by a 5-year-old with training wheels.

Minneapolis is famous for its parks and parkways and we should encourage more people to get out and enjoy them. I have four requests for the mayor, city and park board to make the experience more enjoyable and safer. Happily, none of these requires any change in existing, applicable law.

• Enforce the speed limit. Just a little well-positioned, recurring enforcement, with stiff penalties, would change driver behavior. Commuters need to realize they are driving through a park.

• Move anything with a motor and wheels off the bike path and onto the parkway. Under current law all those electrified bikes and other toys are “motor vehicles” because they aren’t “moved solely by human power.” That means they don’t belong on the bike path. Let’s require all the e-rollers to use the road, which will help to temper the speed of the cars and make the parkway feel like it is, in fact, part of a park.

• Street bikers who want to ride over 10 mph should be welcomed on the road. Many bikers who are out for exercise already ride on the parkways, but it’s not always a welcoming ride, with frustrated drivers often honking or passing too close. It should become the norm, not the exception, to follow a biker if you’re driving on a parkway.

• Ask Google Maps and other driving apps to remove parkways from preferred routes. I don’t pretend to know how the mapping apps figure out a preferred route. But it seems they often disburse traffic from designed arteries to less-trafficked places, like parkways. (Are times calculated by speed limit or traffic flow?) We want our parkways to be a destination, not the fastest way to get to some other place. Announcing that to Google Maps might be a City Council resolution that the whole city could get behind.

The Park Board boasts in its ordinances that the Minneapolis parkways have “gained national and international fame for their history, beauty, and innovation.” If you’ve ridden the grand round, you probably agree. This summer let’s treat the parkways as deserving of that fame, as places we come to recreate, to exercise, to see plants and trees and flowers and bees. Let’s enjoy our parkways as a park.

Kevin Reuther, of Minneapolis, is an attorney.