Soul Asylum & Cracker To Play BergenPAC

(ENGLEWOOD, NJ) -- Bergen Performing Arts Center (BergenPAC) presents Soul Asylum and Cracker on Sunday, July 23 at 8:00pm. Tickets range between $29 to $59 to see the bands behind alt-rock hits like "Runaway Train", "Somebody To Shove", "Euro-Trash Girl" and "Teen Angst".

Soul Asylum’s 11th studio album, Change of Fortune, embodies the band’s trademark balance of rocking abandon, infectious melodic craft and raw-nerved emotional depth. Founding singer/guitarist Dave Pirner’s compositions showcase the versatility of the alternative rock band’s current lineup, which teams Pirner with guitarist Justin Sharbono, bassist Winston Roye and drummer Michael Bland. “It’s more honest than any record I’ve made in a very long time, just because there was no one looking over my shoulder and editing me, which was very liberating for me,” says Pirner.

Originally known as Loud Fast Rules, the group was formed in Minneapolis, Minn. in 1981. After early indie success, the band entered the major-label mainstream with 1988’s Hang Time and its 1990 follow-up And the Horse They Rode In On, and achieved platinum success with 1992’s Grave Dancers Union and 1995’s Let Your Dim Light Shine. The band went on hiatus after 1998’s Candy from a Stranger, but in 2006 with The Silver Lining and Delayed Reaction in 2012.

Cracker’s 10th studio effort, the double-album, Berkeley To Bakersfield, finds this uniquely American band traversing two different sides of the California landscape – the northern Bay area and further down-state in Bakersfield.

In the late ‘70s and ‘80s a harder-edged style of rock music emerged from the Bay area, while Bakersfield is renowned for its own iconic twangy country music popularized. Yet despite these differences, they are both elements that Cracker’s two cofounders, David Lowery and Johnny Hickman, have embraced to some degree on nearly every one of their studio albums over the last two decades. On Berkeley To Bakersfield, however, instead of integrating these two genres together within one disc, they’ve neatly compartmentalized them onto their own respective regionally-titled LPs.