On February 24, 2024, CEREMONY performed Rohnert Park in full at a sold out show in Los Angeles for the first and only time to celebrate the album’s 10th anniversary. Normally, I’m a skeptic when it comes to album anniversary shows. The element of surprise isn’t really there in the setlist while nostalgia can render the music into a shell of its original self because nothing ever tops the moment you got to experience those same songs played out there in the wild without any of the formalities surrounding them. Live At The Hollywood Palladium is an anomaly in that regard in that it looks back at one of the modern era of hardcore and punk scene’s greatest and most progressive albums and presents it from the lens of where the band stands in their evolution today.

I wasn’t there to witness the event, but the whole point of a live album is that you didn’t have to be in order to feel the energy that was in the room that night. It goes further beyond what’s palpable than that, though, as there’s an audible affliction in style shifts where the snarling madman shouting of frontman Ross Farrar as well as the buzzsawing guitars of the listen’s original form have been refined into morbid post-punk intonations akin to the band’s — and its assorted solo ventures’ — current aesthetic. When the Rohnert Park set wraps and CEREMONY lunges into the wayside of more recent work highlights and a Dead Kennedys cover (on that note: 6 Cover Songs II, when?,) there’s the realization that this night wasn’t just to mark one specific moment in the band’s past, but celebrate of the entirety of the timeline, still letting it move them forward today.

Highlights: “Sick (Live)”, “Open Head (Live)”, “California Über Alles (Live)”

CEREMONY’s Live At The Hollywood Palladium is available now on Relapse Records.

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