When Marcy Playground comes to WOW Hall tomorrow night, the show will mark the ongoing run of a band enjoying its rebirth.
Unofficially broken up for five years since its 2004 album “MP3,” Marcy Playground’s guitarist and vocalist John Wozniak and bassist Dylan Keefe got back together and began recording again. Teaming up with the addition of drummer Shlomi Lavie, the three recorded the 2009 album “Leaving Wonderland in a Fit of Rage.”
Since the release, the band has been touring with vicious dedication in the style it knows best: paying homage to its ’90s roots as a grungy, unpolished, fun band.
“We’ve been doing this for a long time now,” Keefe said. “We’ve been on the road for pretty much about two and a half years.”
This is something that is more than positive for the band, which has had its fair shares of ups and downs over its 14-year history.
On the surface, the band’s ability to continuously attract booking agents comes from the successful 1997 single “Sex and Candy” from its self-titled debut album.
Staying perched atop Billboard Modern Rock Tracks at the number one spot for 15 weeks, the song had a staying power that went beyond the catchy intro that got stuck in many listeners’ heads.
In 2007, VH1 named it the 73rd best song of the ’90s, and the band’s debut album eventually sold 1.7 million copies.
In the years following the success that made “Sex and Candy” synonymous with the greatest of ’90s memories, the band has had a varying mix of successes and setbacks.
The band’s second album, 1999’s “Shapeshifter,” didn’t come close to the success of its first album. After “MP3,” the band unofficially parted ways.
So when the band got back into the studio in 2009, it was a rebirth for the band and a chance for the band to put out its own sound — a sound that appears to have fallen out of the popular music scene.
Keefe and Wozniak, now both 40, have no intentions of changing up their musical approach to what’s popular now.
“We’re a rock trio that allows for a lot of space,” Keefe said. “So we aren’t super polished playing through playbacks and have five guys on stage taking up all the sonic space. We’re a dirty, sloppy rock band in the tradition of more classic trio bands.”
And as music veterans, they’re allowed to insert their opinion on the current state of music.
“I feel that the trend is to make it as squeaky clean as possible, and when you do it that way, it loses life,” Keefe said. “What tends to be popular right now is the really large, shiny, Coldplay-sounding-like bands, and we’re really not like that.”
With such an opinion, the band plans to take a break from touring and record more tracks sometime this spring.
The album will mark another milestone in the band’s renaissance.
Of course, rebirth doesn’t hide the fact that the band has been in existence for a decade and a half. There’s nothing wrong with sounding like a veteran.
“I wanted to go see the Cold War Kids and tickets were like 85 bucks. Even if I do have a connection to get into something like that, it’s like, (screw) that,” Keefe said.