The Columbus, Ohio, band play the final show of their tour tonight at the Bishop Bar. Philadelphia band Cayetana, a girl group that has accompanied The Sidekicks on more than half the tour, is on the lineup. Local band Nice Try is also slated as an opening act.
Steve Ciolek, lead vocalist and guitarist for The Sidekicks, said he didn’t really know how to describe their live show besides being ?“just fun.”
“It’s a pretty loose atmosphere,” he said. “We don’t light anything on fire, but maybe we will.”
Although “Runners in the Nerved World” is the band’s fourth full-length album, Ciolek said their live set lists tend to stick to songs from that album and their 2012 album “Awkward Breeds.”
“We’ve just been a band for quite a while because we started in high school,” he said. “So we have a bunch of songs, but they’re not really relevant to our ?lives anymore.”
The songs the Sidekicks play from their new album are a lot of fun because Ciolek said they take on a more energetic form when they perform live in front of a crowd.
The band released “Runners in the Nerved World” in January through Epitaph Records, and Ciolek said this is probably the first time they have released an album through a label where more than one person worked on their project.
“Just hearing that somebody is having a meeting about your album is strange, but also nice because it’s like, ‘Well at least we know that they’re working on this and doing their best to get it out to people,’” Ciolek said.
“Runners in the Nerved World” is also the first album Ciolek said the band has worked with a professional producer. In the past, the band typically asked a friend of theirs to produce their albums. For the new album the band worked with producer Phil Ek, who has worked on albums such as The Cave Singers’ “Naomi” and Fleet Foxes’ “Helplessness Blues.”
Ciolek said working with Ek is one aspect of “Runners in the Nerved World” that makes the album feel more complete than the band’s previous albums.
“It was nice to have someone who wasn’t a friend be in on the whole process,” he said. “He wasn’t afraid to say when we were doing something that wasn’t cool or wasn’t working.”
The style of music on the new album is mostly pop, Ciolek said. The band committed itself to trying to make more of a pop album, he said, and the production sounds like what would be found on a pop-rock album from the 1970s.
Ciolek said the idea behind “Runners in the Nerved World” came from personal life experiences and the experiences of his friends. He said he wanted to write an album about people who are done “growing up.”
The characters in the album aren’t having any more obviously new life experiences, so they try to simulate the feeling by meeting new people, going to new places or using mind-altering drugs.
“It’s sort of simulating that movement, but in the end it’s ending right back where they began,” Ciolek said.
