Brick and Mortar opened up the Motion City Soundtrack’s Commit this to Memory tour at the Granada theater in Lawrence Sunday night. Recently Brick and Mortar has started to get some airplay with their song ‘Hollow Tune’. This was the second time I’ve seen them play live and they were definitely better the second time around. The band uses a lot of backing tracks and their lineup consists of a drummer and singer who play either bass or guitar. They’re definitely a talented band and it really seems like they might be going places.

William Beckett followed Brick and Mortar and, even though I hadn’t really heard of him before, I was pleasantly surprised with what he brought to the table. He’s been around for a while and is doing solo work at the moment. His act Sunday night consisted of his voice and his acoustic guitar. At one point he had a pair of men’s Marvel Comics boxer briefs thrown at him, and he was a good sport, thanking the person who threw them for giving him an experience he’d never had before.

At a little after 9 p.m. the Motion City Soundtrack finally took the stage and immediately started playing their first song. This tour in particular is a bit different than other ones; the Commit this to Memory tour is one where the band is solely focused on playing old songs, and ones they may not have played live in quite a while. The second song they played was “Everything is Alright” – it’s actually the first song I ever heard by them, and it was a great rendition. Just when the band needed it, William Beckett came back out to fill in the second vocals. After he was walking off it was clear that the band and Beckett were really good friends, and that just added to the vibe of the performance. The band’s frontman, Justin Pierre, was clearly a bit shy but it was clear he’d been playing music and doing his thing for a while, a bit like Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo. At this point the crowd was really into it and most people near the front were jumping around yelling the words as loud as possible. The audience actually was pretty diverse – teenagers, college kids and young to old adults all mingled together. They played through the rest of their set keeping up the same energy and giving a much better performance musically than I was expecting. The band did two encores, and the last was probably the best, playing their song “The Future Freaks Me Out.” There was more energy in the last song than all of the other ones and it seemed like the audience sang half the words. Motion City Soundtrack was a lot better than I thought they’d be after listening to them for so long and never seeing them live. The whole show definitely was better than expected and the rest of the tour is bound to be a good one.