EXNATIONS At The Stone Pony

Megan Froehlich

You don’t need to spend all night roaming the streets of New York to feel like an insomniac. You don’t need to be in a crowd full of people screaming lyrics in unison to feel a part of something so much bigger than yourself. And you don’t need to go back to the 1980s to feel nostalgia induced by artful synthesizers. You can bite into all of these experiences by going to an EXNATIONS show. At 3:30 pm on Sunday, March 8th in front of a small group by the Jersey Shore, they put their audience in a time machine that may have sounded like history but felt like the future.

The Brooklyn-based band isn’t used to playing shows so early in the day, but with the sun shining bright outside Asbury Park, New Jersey’s The Stone Pony, the band created an atmosphere divergent from the reality we were in. EXNATIONS took the time to address this contrast saying, yes, it’s early and clear out, but “It’s dark and hazy up here.” The band made the conflicting environments seamlessly integrate with magenta and purple lights illuminating the stage. With the help of a fog machine, the colors were carried to the audience, achieving the visual image of the title of the band’s sophomore EP, Pink Haze. The blaring of the speakers enveloped the audience and made us feel like we were living in the music alongside every beat. But there was so much more that made the performance match the band’s vibrant, urban aesthetic than just these technical aspects.

EXNATIONS immediately made the crowd feel welcome and let it know something great was about to happen: “Come on up here, get hazy!” bassist John O’Neill said. The energy in his voice matched with the authenticity of his excitement compelled the audience to step forward as the band began to play “Can’t Get Hurt.” This upbeat song was a great way to get the audience bouncing, especially when lead singer, Sal Mastrocola threw his fist in the air and screamed “Out of control!” inviting everyone on the floor to drop their inhibitions and just get lost in the music.

Mastrocola adds weight in his already heavy words, seen especially in the next song of their set, “Never About the Money” when he transitions from reminiscing on “all the bridges I could burn” to saying he “wouldn’t piss to put [them] out.” When he spits those words live, the raw declaration ignites the anger in the hearts of everyone listening.

The cutting lyrics create sharp images that transcend through all their music. When the band performed “Knife,” they articulated lines like “the love is bleeding thin” which personifies something as abstract as love and assigns it a physical pain that an audience can feel. “The petals from a dying prom night rose” is another lyric from the song that exhibits the band’s ability to tell a gripping story with only a few words.

Alongside the lyrical punches, there was a familiar comfort attached to the music coming from Mastrocola’s voice. With every song they played, it became harder to deny just how much he sounds like a descendent of The Cure’s Robert Smith. Both men sing deep tones that resonate in the chests of fans while the smooth shape of the vocalists’ words softens all of their listeners’ troubles. EXNATIONS has been compared to Simple Minds, Tears for Fears, and other bands that reached their height in the 1980s, a period that EXNATIONS emulates in vocals, composition, and song titles like “John Hughes Movie Soundtrack.” Mastrocola commented, “I feel like it was a time in pop music where people were just doing really interesting things. And I think that’s happening again now.”

But EXNATIONS isn’t set to be the next Tears for Fears or New Order, and they know they aren’t the only 80s fans. “There’s a lot of people making this kind of music because the tools are available on basically every computer,” O’Neill acknowledged. He said their music has “that twist on it that shows that it’s more intense, it’s got that deeper process.”

“I wanted to make people feel things,” Drummer Taylor Hughes said. “I want it to be an atmosphere where they can kind of surround themselves with and not think about anything that’s political or drama in their lives, they can just listen to the record and be in that record.” This goal is accomplished when someone puts on their headphones and plays an EXNATIONS track, but what about when they’re standing in front of the band at a live show? Does the intention translate?

The answer lies at the end of Sunday’s set when the lights turned to indigo spots of bright white. As the band played “Blank White,” each beat felt like a count between the lightning and the thunder as we waited out a storm together in the comfort of The Stone Pony. We had this sense of safety, enforced by O’Niell’s smiles and Hughes’ confidence in every strike of her drumsticks, matched with this excitement for what was going on in front of us. Everyone in the room became a unit. This relationship between crowd and performers is what EXNATIONS cherishes. “I think the best live shows are when the audience and the band are interacting and participating with each other,” Mastrocola said. “When I feel that, it’s transcendent.”

So even though there was no late-night thunderstorm, sold-out crowd, or an actual time machine to pull us away from reality, the audience couldn’t feel these absences, and it witnessed a beautiful contrast of solace and ferocity.