In Da Club: Anchorhead at the Terminal Bar

The Terminal Bar is an old East Hennepin dive primed for a renaissance. But however bright its future, the place has a thick history that it drags along like an anchor through Mississippi mud. You can feel it in the walls. As such, it was a fitting place to take in Anchorhead, a quintet of reformed punks restyled as a retro-country outfit, who completed the Terminal's old-meets-new-meets-old aesthetic loop. The shitty weather on this rainy Saturday night put the reasonably large crowd in the mood to dance to the group's crafty shotgun-in-the-mouth ballads. But first came a well-received opening set by Battle at Sea, a crew of Fargoans who couldn't help but channel their inner Jawbreaker despite enlisting a keyboardist and a dude on tenor sax. It wasn't a terribly harmonious billing, as Battle at Sea and Anchorhead share little more in common than a North Dakota pedigree. Anchorhead's bassist is from Minot; also, his name is Truck, which means he was born to play country bass. Near the end of the night, as Truck took the mic to sing the crowd-favorite "St. Paul," he inadvertently called attention to the night's only letdown: the absurd beer prices. "Let's raise our pints," he called, and the crowd did, lifting high their plastic cups of $3.75 Old Style. C'mon, Terminal Bar, get with the times.