Orchid in Defiant Embrace of Age

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #177. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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Wide but shallow.

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Myself and many like me had made peace that we’d never see the band Orchid play live. I missed my chance in Denver at the century’s turn, and most others probably because the prolifically impactful hardcore band kicked around for only five years or so before splitting off into dozens of other projects. Even then, most of the shows were in the typical punk nooks and crannies, with underpowered PAs and intentionally minimal barriers between audience and band.

Some incredible records, as well as limited lo-fi footage and looming myth were all that remained of Orchid for 22 years. I’ve been to many shows similar to what they got up to in their run – humid, cramped, word-of-mouth spaces where a lot of locals honed their edges before regionally touring bands in the early stages of grizzlement. Most played imitations of their influences, others melded something magical that changed the lives or at least the tastes of a handful of folks in the room. Those of us who shared the experience tried our best to spread the word, but people lock in their tastes early, and really, you had to be there to feel the jolt.

But for some bands like Orchid, those they inspired shouted it out from coast to coast and beyond. The legends grew, and the records backed it all up, and luckily were kept in print and easy to find one way or another. Still, we assumed the band wasn’t interested in looking back, for the usual punk reasons – the music was for the moment, it was young and the players are all old now, who could come, how distasteful is it to get paid for that sort of thing?

Each of those questions are steeped in mercurial hardcore regulations hammered out when the music was still fresh and then almost immediately disavowed by the scribes. These bands thought they’d never get old, but then so did the Stones and the Who and all the rest, but they’re human too. We all got old, though the music didn’t, and we presumed there might be an uncomfortable phase-shift between then and now. But then the members of Orchid got together, found the weight of the years less cumbersome than they imagined, and in the most pure punk spirit of all said, “Fuck it.”

So as has been the case the past few years with Jawbreaker, Sunny Day Real Estate, Botch, Jawbox, Karate, Unwound, on and on and on, the unthinkable happened, reformation occurred even if some patching was required. And for the most part the music still thrived, the players were not so infirm as we though people over 40 might be, or rather that the music was more than just a snapshot but something that could grow alongside us. Whether that meant shifted timbres, fresh and robust rearrangement, even more power, as if the performers had finally caught up with their earlier ambitions.

Things might have felt different with Orchid. There was a hint of that in the air as I walked into the Royale for their big Boston reunion show, as more than one old head smugly opined that the shirt line was very long for a band that has a song titled “No, We Don’t Have Any T-Shirts.” But it’s 2024, and I at least had seen some of the footage from the low-cap Western Mass show the night before, and the fact remained that the Orchid of yore and this resurrection still fired on all cylinders not just for the efforts of the members of the band but by extension everyone in the room. There were more people than ever before, and they were primed by two decades of hunger to sing about theory and fuck with gender through songs written before even the MySpace era.

Orchid reunited on their own terms, sold some merch, played a lot from their last album which was released the day of their first last show. The set ran probably 400% longer than it might have back in the day, tempting exhaustion, but those of us on the floor carried them all the way on our sweat-soaked backs. It was a beautiful spectacle.

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Levi Rubeck is a critic and poet currently living in the Boston area. Check his links at levirubeck.com.