Midway through a pumped-up 21-song set at the Atlantis on Wednesday night, Pom Pom Squad’s Mia Berrin told the crowd, “We’re going to do some melancholy.” The four-piece band then played the achingly poignant “Everybody’s Moving On” and “Montauk,” both from their 2024 album Mirror Starts Moving Without Me.
If you pulled those two songs out of the show, you might assume Berrin is a master of beautiful, melodious balladry, full of longing and heartbreak. You’d be correct, but if you hadn’t been stuck in the bathroom for the first eight songs of the set, you’d know Pom Pom Squad can also rock fast and loud.
After all, just before shifting melancholy, Berrin brought her mother onstage to offer the adoring crowd some advice…
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“If they ain’t paying your bills, pay the bitches no mind.” Then Berrin, guitarist Alex Mercuri, bassist Lauren Marquez, and drummer Shelby Keller launched into a ferocious “Street Fighter.”
“Call your therapist if you want to talk – You make petty remarks, I make pretty girl rock.”
Hearing the range of sounds and songs that Pom Pom Squad has produced across a couple of EPs and a couple more full-length albums, it’s easy to see that Berrin is a songwriter with the talent to claim “pretty girl rock” without the slightest hint of denigration.
There’s probably a reason why so much of the best rock music today is coming from women, from transgendered performers, from gays, lesbians and artists of color. Don’t get your boxers in an uproar. Hetero white men (and women) are still perfectly capable of producing outstanding music.
It’s just that they’ve held the mic for a very long time. Simply hearing new voices is bound to be refreshing.
A Pom Pom Squad show is nothing if not refreshing. They are brisk – squeezing those 21 songs into about 75 minutes. But Berrin’s songs have nuance and dimension that eschew the redundancy often found in similarly fast-paced punk or pop shows. She can angle her music toward punk or pop without sounding like 1990s pop punk.
There are atmospherics, often courtesy of Marquez, a trained sound engineer, who doubles on keyboards. But she usually sticks to a relentless bass line, just as Keller and Mercuri play mostly no-frills drums and guitar solos, such as they are, last no more than a few seconds.
That showcases the power of the songs. Berrin performs the entirety of Mirror Starts Moving Without Me, opening with the double shot that kicks off the album, Downhill and Spinning. Though she had initially expressed some concern about how fans would receive a new batch of songs that leaned away from her punkier roots, those songs match the impact of much of 2021’s breakout album Death of a Cheerleader.
She eventually gets around to a healthy dose of Cheerleader, beginning with a banging “Shame Reactions” and then doing her cover of “Crimson and Clover,” dedicated to “the girls who like girls.” Later, the band cranks out “Drunk Voicemail” and her sinewy tribute to Smokey Robinson, “Second That.”
After the quiet of “Second That,” Berrin goes back even further, to the 2019 EP Ow for “Heavy Heavy.” She introduces that song by announcing, “Now we’re gonna scream it out.” And that’s exactly what “Heavy Heavy” does. So you may get the impression that Pom Pom Squad used to be punk and now is more pop. But that overlooks the fact that Berrin, in a short time, has matured as a songwriter.
A second song from Ow, “Honeysuckle,” follows “Heavy Heavy.” Berrin says they never played it live before this tour. “Honeysuckle” shows very clearly that she has been working the seam between “scream-it-out” punk and more melodious pop from early on.
When she hits the final three songs of her main set – all from Mirror – she shows off that evolution with a flat-out rocker, “Messages,” and the prettily gothic “The Tower” closing out that part of the show.
She kicks off that final trio with a titanic version of “Doll Song,” a sing-songy lament somehow built out of pieces of Sound of Music’s “My Favorite Things.” I’ll admit up front that in a repertoire full of stronger rockers, “Doll Song” may be my favorite Berrin composition to date, and it gets a powerhouse live treatment.
When they return for a final encore, Berrin and Pom Pom Squad close with what is probably their best-known number, the grungy “Head Cheerleader,” with its signature affirmation “I’m gonna marry the scariest girl on the cheerleading team.” Most of the fans, some of whom had brought their pom poms along for the show, seemed entirely supportive of that goal.
Caroline Kingsbury, like Berrin, a native of Florida who left for greener musical pastures, opened the show with an equally brisk seven-song set. Whereas Berrin settled in New York, Kingsbury made her way to LA (with a stopover in Nashville) and leans a bit more into Chappel Roan-style theatrical pop. She played songs from her new EP, I Really Don’t Care!, which shows off her powerhouse voice.
Much of the new EP pays homage to the synth and drum-fueled pop of the ‘80s, but Kingsbury has a modern hybrid energy that pairs nicely with Pom Pom Squad. Performed live, “Alabama” morphs into a rock anthem only hinted at in the studio.
The Atlantis show was the penultimate stop on a six-week tour. Pom Pom Squad is probably looking forward to the break. But if they felt run down from the road, no one in the crowd of about 450 could detect it on Wednesday.
Call it punk or pop – or make up your new word – Pom Pom Squad gives you a range of brilliant, high-energy songs tempered by equally smart, softer ballads. Whatever the genre may be, Pom Pom Squad knows how to rock.