Deacon Konc met us at the door. “Oh, great! The Phantom Tollbooth! You are here to review the show, right?” The young, outgoing lead singer of local high school band Wrong Way Charlie had invited us earlier in the week via e-mail, but we’d never met before. (Here’s a public relations hint for aspiring musicians: if a pair of blond ladies lugging notebooks, cameras, and tape recorders show up at one of your shows, ask them to interview you.) 

The sign outside the Heart and Soul Café read “Sat. Hardcore,” but that proved to be inaccurate. The original headliner for the evening, Klank, had dropped out, leaving a much broader sound stream behind. 

Openers Wrong Way Charlie were good and loud, but in more of a modern rock vein. Regular play in the area for these tight-knit home schooled teens is only one factor in their potential commercial success. These are second generation musicians from the Warehouse Church in Aurora, Illinois--long known for their support of Christian rock, and they’ve taught the youngsters well. 

Spoken stretched the hardcore definition in the hip-hop direction. When I last saw them a few months ago, an occasional sample was an interesting sidebar to their heavy sound. This time, a local DJ joined them to scratch and control the samples from his double turntable setup. The singer’s loose lips tripped out the words at a respectable clip over pared-back guitar crunch still delivered at hardcore sound levels. Spoken is morphing, and the younger members of crowd loved it. Perhaps it is time for Christian rock venues to face it:  young people dig dance and hip-hop as much as those a few years older dig head-banging. 

The Miscellaneous enlarged the night’s entertainment to encompass Europe--you might even call it “worldcore.” The first impression is that this is a band that falls into the Sixpence None the Richer camp; a female singer heading up technically-minded instrumentalists. The craft of the musicians is certainly equal to Sixpence, but the main singer of the band is actually guitarist Stef Loy, an American, and the act’s music builds intensity to a pitch worthy of the hardcore volume used to deliver it. At times, the level overwhelmed the subtle three-part vocal harmonies, but the instruments were up to the sonic onslaught, lead by the axe work of BoH, whose personally-owned record label leans toward industrial and real hardcore, Scandinavian style. 

The audience stuck with these three liberal definitions of hardcore to the end of the night. It is that sort of support that allows artists, and venues, to stretch the boundaries in the first place. The Heart and Soul Cafe is the entertainment arm of a parachurch youth ministry organization whose primary constituency is high school students. The Cafe's version of  hardcore proved to be much more appealing to those teens than a night of  straight metal ever would have been here in the late nineties.