Reunion shows are often more about the audience than about the band. I wondered how the double reunion bill of Team Dresch and Erase Errata would fare last night, considering that the Vera Project's demographic is unlikely to have been going to shows at the apex of the Riot Grrrl and Queercore movements. ("I was seven!" someone in the crowd gulped, when Jody Bleyle told an anecdote about writing songs in 1994.)

• Lisa Orth (Telepathic Liberation Army)

DJ Dewey Decimal and Telepathic Liberation Army set a consistent tone for the night as the audience trickled in, largely queer, largely on bikes. I felt like there should have been more people there, but the consensus in the crowd definitely was 'what a fucking awesome lineup,' with everyone pressing closer and closer to the stage with each subsequent band.

• Jenny Hoyston (Erase Errata)

Erase Errata's set was low-key and precise. Bianca Sparta held it tight with a well-deployed cowbell and a loose hi hat with a tambourine on top. Bassist Ellie Erickson was the focal point of the band, eye-catching in a neon headband and bopping her blonde mop in time. Jenny Hoyston's voice is rich and warm, channeling David Byrne with her speak-singing. (She's a DJ too; I wanna see a mash up of Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" with Erase Errata's brilliant anti-war screed "Tax Dollar," which was the high note of their set. Imagine "I got away, yes I really got away" juxtaposed with "Same as it ever was..." Somebody do this, please.)

For most of the set, the keyboards were a little low in the mix. But by their last song, the Vera team really got it together. Each element was distinct and perfect as Erase Errata built to cacaphony— Jenny using a slide and Ellie employing a drumstick.

• Ellie Erickson (Erase Errata)

I couldn't have predicted the amount of enthusiasm that poured out of the crowd for Team Dresch. They kicked the set off with "Screwing Yer Courage" which starts softly: "It's summer / the hair's grown in / on my upper thigh / just like so much corn / in late July" before careening into "we'll stock up on canned goods and move to the woods / we'll find a piece of land and quit this fucking band / I love you."

After that, they careened into "Freewheel," their poppy, carnival ride of a song, and forget it. The audience was in motion, jumping, pushing and some seeming torn, like "do I want in to the dizzy locus, or do I want out?"

For a band with only two albums to their credit (which we have memorized in their entirety, don't we now?), their performance was anything but rote. Donna, Kaia, Jody and Marcy got a kick out of switching up time signatures and adding copious ritards— a dramatic device that worked; making the audience increasingly crazy. But it's the lyrics that are king; journal-like internal monologues about identity politics that are still completely resonant fifteen years later.

• Kaia Wilson (Team Dresch)

Kaia Wilson's guitar strap broke at one point. She's also apparently in training to play ping pong at the gay games? The banter skewed political, too. Jody talked about gay parenting, and imitated the consensus of all the lawyers she has spoken too about it: "just take your child, and put them in a cage— surrounded with legal documents— and take the whole thing with you, everywhere you go."

I kept wishing, for the bands' sake, that there were more people there. But when I looked around and noticed how many of the people who were there were singing every last lyric, or listening, transfixed, with rapt attention, or dogpiling with tears in their eyes, I remembered an interview that Jody did with Punk Planet in 1997.

"People write letters to me all the time saying, 'I was walking down the street wearing [my Team Dresch shirt] and someone saw and we ended up going out to coffee and talking about this and that.' ...These people wear their Team Dresch T-shirt because if someone else sees them in one, they're gonna maybe know that they're queer or a freak. The shirt could be an empty sign that just means, 'I might be interested in these things, or it might be safe to talk to me about these things.' That feels really good."