Concert Review

Mineral Show Review

Written by Jeff Ramella on January 30, 2019

by Mike Stringham

On Saturday, January 19th I saw Mineral at Elsewhere in Brooklyn. This show was another PopGun Presents show at their lovely new-ish venue Elsewhere. It was a rainy and snowy night and I was supposed to work until 5pm. That was fine, because Mineral was slated to go on at 8:45pm. Well, there were a bunch of issues at work and I couldn’t leave to go to this show until 8:10. I was literally so nervous that I was going to miss this show, because I LOVE this band. I ran to my car, drove to Brooklyn in 28 minutes, found a spot a few minutes from the venue and made it on time. You might say that it’s lucky, and I’d have to agree; I made it on time to see Mineral and I got over 3 hours OT at work.

This was the second time I’ve seen the 90’s emo band in the past five years. I saw them at Bowery Ballroom in the summer of 2014, during the big emo revival that happened that year. It was one of the best shows I had seen in 2014. My favorite album of the two they made in their short time as a band from 1994-1998, was their first album The Power of Failing. They played my favorite track of theirs as well, “If I Could”. I also grabbed the setlist from the stage after that show and a copy of the highly coveted repress of that album. Upon further inspection of the setlist, I saw they misspelled the song’s title and put “If I Cloud” – I laughed at this and appreciated the setlist even more because of this. It now sits inside the sleeve of that record.

This time around, they opened with three tracks from The Power of Failing, which is a strong start to a show for them; as all three were powerful tracks – “Five, Eight & Ten”, “Gloria” and “Slower”. After that they played a bunch of tracks off their second album, Endserenading; as well as three other non-album songs, one of them being a new track that was released this year. In true Mineral form they ended with the first two tracks from Endserenading, “LoveLetterTypeWriter” and “Palisade”; then the fan favorite track “Parking Lot”. I was elated to have actually made the show and seen them again, and bought Endserenading on vinyl as well, because I didn’t have it.

What I (and you) can take away from this, is that Mineral is by far one of the most important mid-90’s emo bands. Without them paving the way during that time, many popularized modern emo bands would not exist. Current emo is nothing like the emo of 20+ years ago either, with modern emo bands probably in the 4th or 5th wave of that genre. I would say Mineral was in the second wave of emo/screamo, along with bands like Sunny Day Real Estate, I Hate Myself, Cap’n Jazz, Saetia, At The Drive In, etc. Basically, without these bands we would have never heard more popular (3rd/4th wave) emo acts like My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, The Used, Fall Out Boy, etc. So, listen to Mineral and enjoy what emo was, emotive hardcore. See below for the setlist to the Mineral show I saw, as well as links to all the bands I mentioned.

Setlist