Ace of Cups paints a quiet scene in the middle of the day, preparing for the nights ahead. Credit: Emma Dawson | Lantern Reporter
If early 2000s emo music was a staple of many students’ teenage years, there’s a place they can go to in Columbus to rage their hearts out.
Sad Boyz, a 21-plus throwback DJ set that started in March 2015, takes place on the last Wednesday of every month at Ace of Cups, located at 2619 N. High St. The theme is “spinning the classics” with bands — such as Paramore, Fall Out Boy and Blink-182, according to its website. This month, Sad Boyz is featuring a live act, local emo-cover band Flicker Fade.
DJ Misha Rickard said Sad Boyz has been in the Columbus area for over seven years, but Sad Boyz events featuring live acts have been few and far between. Aaron Dill, guitarist of Flicker Fade, said it has been a dream of his to play a live set for Sad Boyz after working with the organization from 2017-19.
“I just hit them up and was like ‘Hey, I’m working to build a live-band emo night, we’re trying to build this whole community around it, we’d love to partner with Sad Boyz,’” Dill said. “Try to team up in that aspect so that they could mix it up and have a live band perform every few months, add some excitement to the event.”
Dill said at Wednesday’s show, audiences can expect to hear a slew of emo favorites from Flicker Fade, whose setlist stems from a master Spotify playlist edited by its members at whim to make sure they hit all the emo classics with music from bands, such as Taking Back Sunday and My Chemical Romance.
“If we hear a song where it’s like ‘Aw, I remember that song, we should play that, we should play that for a show sometime,’ we’ll add it to that big list of songs,” Dill said. “For every show, we try to tweak our set list a little bit.”
A majority of the passion for Flicker Fade’s work is centered around creating a community to enjoy memories spurred on by the alternative music that was a soundtrack to its members’ adolescent lives, Dill said.
“It’s kind of the perfect music now to have an event that people come, they can hang out, they can feel the nostalgia of hearing all the music we listened to in middle school and high school,” Dill said. “It gives an event for people to get a break from everything else going on and relive a little bit of their youth.”
Rickard said her love for emo music stems from the same sense of nostalgia as Flicker Fade’s and is what led her to becoming involved with Sad Boyz.
“Being of the MySpace era, I think, I was constantly on my computer trying to download new music and find stuff that, what I thought, people really didn’t know at the time,” Rickard said. “All of that has just kind of stuck with me.”
Building a community was just one of two primary goals Dill said he hoped to achieve in creating Flicker Fade. From its beginning stages, Flicker Fade’s other goal was to give back to that same community.
“We wanted to build something that’s more than an emo-cover band,” Dill said. “We partner with local charities and give out a portion of our merch sales and a portion of door sales to local charities depending on who we want to partner with for each show.”
For this performance, Dill said a portion of Flicker Fade’s sales will be going to We Amplify Voices, a local nonprofit providing youth mentorship through music.
“They are a local charity that provides funding, they provide instruments, workshops and professional instructors to underserved youth in Columbus,” Dill said. “[WAV go] in and help them create music, create art, and kind of help them, guide them, in using that as an outlet for expressing themselves.”
Rickard said on an average Sad Boyz night, there are at least 300 people at the event. With these numbers, Dill said the group hopes to pull at least $200 to donate to WAV by the end of the evening.
“We donate $2 for every shirt and poster sold, 50 percent of any merch tips and then around 10 percent of any guarantee/ticket cut we make from the show,” Dill said in an email.
Every Sad Boyz event is free before 10 p.m. and costs $5 at the door thereafter, according to its website.
