Review: “Bane: Holding These Moments” (2020)
Director Dan Elswick’s documentary represents a riveting swan song for the beloved hardcore band
By: James Swift
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Bane: Holding These Moments isn’t what’s included in the movie, but what is omitted. Despite Bane being one of the most revered straight edge bands of the 21st century, the term “straight edge” itself isn’t uttered once in the entire 100-minute-plus runtime of director Dan Elswick’s documentary.
One can only imagine how confused the casual observer is when seeing scene after scene of band members sporting those enigmatic black X’s on their hands, only to have the implicit meaning of the iconography never expounded upon. Nor do you hear much about the clean-living, drug-free punk rock ethos in the film’s interviews with scores of Bane supporters, who have an odd tendency to only describe their sound as “hardcore.”
It’s a peculiar narrative choice to intentionally skirt away from the straight edge aspect of the group’s music and lifestyle, since that’s a hallmark that clearly distinguishes Bane from scores of other post-punk outfits that emerged from the late 1990s. Indeed, judging from the interviewee selections in this film, one might assume that Bane was more or less catering to vegan bakeries and the Make-A-Wish set — not that the old Minor Threat principles can’t likewise be in play there, of course.
With that perplexing editing choice out of the way, however, it’s hard to find too many faults with Holding These Moments, which chronicles the beloved Massachusetts-based act’s 2016 farewell tour. Ultimately, the film never reaches the brilliant heights of, say, Another State of Mind, but it never devolves into shameless hagiography, either. For fans of the band, this is an absolute must-see, and even if you’ve never heard of them before you’re likely to enjoy the bulk of what Holding These Moments has to offer … pending you’re not averse to lyrics like “give more, give everything, give blood” being shouted by a buncha’ sweaty New Englanders, naturally.
As any good “rockumentary” would, Holding These Moments does a very good job of laying out the origins of the group, particularly how Bane was cobbled together from miscellaneous bands such as Converge, Aggressive Hate and Backbone. After an amusing sequence explaining the art of “gang vocals,” we learn that the band was almost called Summer’s End — a near-moniker that was discarded after the band literally thumbed across the word “bane” during a random perusing of a thesaurus.
There’s a lot of great home video clips sprinkled throughout the documentary in addition to the professional-grade footage of the band eating large quantities of doughnuts in Las Vegas (you know, in between the actual concerts and all.) Along the way we learn that Anthony Moreschi of Ten Yard Fight screamed “shit your pants” while doing gang vocals on one guest spot with the group, while the band — as a plurality — write off It All Comes Down To This as one of the worst-sounding hardcore albums ever, even if it does include their big breakout song “Can We Start Again.”
There’s a great scene where the band slogs through the hurricane-drenched streets of Houston for a show, which is followed by an even more entertaining look back at Bane’s 2000 tour with Death By Stereo and Adamantium. We get to watch them shoot Roman candles at each other (in one especially amusing anecdote, one band member recounts spending $100 on fireworks and then being unable to rent a hotel room), leap off random bridges and even rearrange the letters on billboards to read such charming phrases as “free internet porn.” There’s even a scene where the band sings a rousing rendition of “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” with a homeless individual — albeit, with the actual audio muted, almost certainly because it would've cost the filmmakers too much money to actually license the rights to Poison’s power ballad favorite.
The band took a decisively different approach for their 2001 release Give Blood. As frontman Aaron Bedard put it, the recording ethos on that one was simply “let’s just hit ‘em and get the fuck out of there.” That led to a tour with Hatebreed and Poison The Well, which is mostly glossed over — and for good reason. The filmmakers wisely chose to spend more time focusing on the death of Steve Neale, which in turn spawned the side project Silent Drive and the still-somewhat-unsung 2004 album Love is Worth It.
From there it’s a potpourri of non-sequiturs: the band playing at a strip club in Louisville (complete with their name misspelled as “Dane” on the marquee), a scene where a five-year-old with cancer goes for the gentlest stage dive in the history of rock and roll music and a cursory overview of the band’s 2014 tours in Europe and Indonesia. After expounding upon the origins of the #boynamedscout hashtag, the movie cuts back to 2005 and retells the production process behind The Note, then the band talks about playing gigs in Japan and South America and naming songs after random soap operas because they, apparently, have a hard time coming up with song names.
Things do take a more emotional turn, however, particularly when Bedard talks about how his experiences being sexually abused in his youth inspired the track “Wrong Planet.” We get to watch the band celebrate Don’t Wait Up making it on the Billboard Top 200, then we learn how Bedard recruited the band’s latest bassist— James Siboni of Casey Jones fame — almost entirely through text messages.
The last 30 minutes of the film focus almost exclusively on the band’s last three or four shows, including a gig at the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia that features guest appearances by a plethora of former band members. In one particularly powerful moment, the camera lingers on the tear-soaked faces of the crowd, all chanting “I will come back for you” in unison, knowing full well that they’ll never get this opportunity again in their lifetime.
Ultimately, the film concludes with the band’s final, final show at The Palladium in Worcester, Mass. on June 18, 2016. It’s an especially emotional night for Siboni, considering his mother died of cancer just days before the concert. Following a moment of silence, the band chainsawed their way through an epic, 24-song setlist, as their adoring fans chant “Thank you Bane” and douse the bandmates in Silly String at the very end of the performance. Thanks to the magic of YouTube, the entire two-hour-plus show is streaming online right now — and to say Bedard and the boys tore the house down would be a crude, crass and insulting understatement, for sure.
While the film doesn’t have the comprehensive scope of a documentary like Salad Days or American Hardcore, it nonetheless does a commendable job demonstrating what made Bane unique in the pantheon of post-post-hardcore acts — although, by that same token, it would’ve been nice to see the filmmakers delve a little bit deeper into the Bane fandom itself. Indeed, some of the most powerful scenes in the documentary revolve around big, burly, tattooed-up punk rockers weeping en masse — clearly, there’s something incredibly personal that reverberates about Bane’s music, and it would have been interesting to glean some more insight from the band’s fans about what they think makes their music so unique and appealing.
As a character study, the documentary never digs too deep into the lives and pathos of the band members, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, the whole point of the film is to capture the ephemerality of a specific tour, and in that case, the exigent circumstances are just as pivotal to the story as the personalities. And with so many different band members to focus on — the final sum comes out to an easy dozen or so musicians — it would’ve been difficult (if not impossible) to give all of the bandmates an equal share of the screen time.
Ultimately, Holding These Moments is a well above-average rockumentary that may not reach the lofty standards set by, say, The Decline of Western Civilization, but it nonetheless does a great job of illustrating the band to those unfamiliar with their work as well as the die-hards who know every word to “Count Me Out” and “Swan Song.”
If you’re even remotely keen on Bane’s music, Holding These Moments is without question a must-see, as soon as possible. Of course, your mileage may vary depending on your penchant for lyrics like “does growing old mean growing strong enough to kill your sentimental side?”, but I have a suspicion that even those who generally despise hardcore music and the straight edge scene may enjoy this one despite their prejudices heading into it.
After all, no matter what kind of music you’re into, we can all relate to a story about father time sneaking up on us and the pain of pulling the cord on a dream you realize is no longer tenable. The title Holding These Moments, clearly, wasn’t an arbitrary choice on the part of the filmmakers — and how fortunate we are that the cameras were around to capture a farewell tour so contradictorily elegiac and exuberant.
Rating: B+
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