Gainesville college students will get to relive their middle-school years Friday: Cute is What We Aim For will be performing at High Dive.
Cute Is What We Aim For is a pop-punk band based out of Buffalo, New York. This show is part of the 10-year anniversary tour for the band’s first album, “The Same Old Blood Rush with a New Touch.”
CIWWAF rose to superstardom with the release of this successful debut in 2006 and would continue to rule the charts for the next few years, with hits like “The Curse of Curves” and “There’s a Class for This.”
What a time that was: the straight-ironed hair, the skin-tight jeans, the chugging power chords and the general overproduction of the pop-punk acts that somehow dominated the mainstream.
Pop-punk made a comeback in the mid-2000s, all thanks to the Hot-Topic-shopping youth and bands like CIWWAF. Albeit, it was a mutated form of pop-punk, a far cry from the slacker anthems of early albums by bands like Green Day and blink-182.
Ten years after the band’s first taste of success, CIWWAF is now back on the road, playing shows throughout the country in September and October.
“We took a few years off, got real jobs, hated it,” said Jeff Czum, the band’s guitarist. “I actually worked as a music editor at Alternative Weekly in Buffalo. It was weird, not playing music but writing about people who are playing music every week; it kind of got to me after a while.”
Vocalist Shaant Hacikyan told a similar story about bartending in a concert hall during CIWWAF’s long hiatus.
“I worked as a bartender at this music venue my friend owned, and that’s really what sparked my passion for music again,” Hacikyan said. “Working that job, a lot of artists I had toured with when I was in the band came through. They kept asking me, ‘What are you doing here?’ and I’d say, ‘Working,’ and they would tell me, ‘Dude, you need to do music again!’”
The band was dropped from Atlantic Records when its second album didn’t sell nearly as well as its first.
“We were signed to Fueled by Ramen, who put out our first album,” Hacikyan said. “But then we got up-streamed to Atlantic Records. Then, you know, the cliche happened: Our second record came out, it sold about half as many copies as our first and within a year Atlantic told us to hit the road.”
Fans of CIWWAF’s first record should rejoice, as the band’s setlist at High Dive will be the entire tracklist of“The Same Old Blood Rush with a New Touch” in order.
So, tease your straightened hair, put on your neon-green skinny jeans and go see CIWWAF if you’re feeling nostalgic or curious or if you’re actually just a fan of the band.
Tickets can be bought in advance at ticketfly.com for $15, $16 at Hear Again Music or $18 at the door. Doors open at 8 p.m. for the 8:30 p.m. show.
