Sponge soaks up crowd at Rubbles

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Sponge plays like a band that realizes there is no life beyond making music.

Every note or beat matters — even in Mount Pleasant, where Sponge played about 1 1/2 hours of Detroit rock at Rubbles, 112 W. Michigan Ave., Thursday night.

The group began with the drone guitar riffs of “Wax Ecstatic (To Sell Angelina)” but — because of some technical difficulty — stopped a few seconds into the song.

“We don’t come up here to play very often, but when we do, we want to get it right,” shirtless singer Vinnie Dombroski warned the audience before band members regained their stride.

They did get it right throughout the night, drawing material from a reservoir of four albums, including their newest, “For All the Drugs in the World.”

Gone are the days of being “Flavor of the Fleeting Moment” during the mid 1990s, when MTV and commercial radio loved the hell out of Sponge like a homecoming queen, then threw the band away like a stained wedding dress.

But that didn’t matter in downtown Mount Pleasant. It just increased the likelihood that people like Shepherd graduate student Jay Powers could watch the band in a more intimate setting closer to home.

“They were better this time than they were two years ago. That’s for sure,” Powers said after the show, which cost $10.

In 2001, Powers slapped down $20 to hear the band play to a smaller audience at Rubbles, he said. He also was among the few to hear them at Finch Fieldhouse last year, when they performed for free during Gentle Friday. “Sponge is the only group you’ve heard on the radio, then you come to a place like this and you get to see them.”

Music appreciators bobbed up and down during heavier numbers, such as “Rotting Pinata,” the title track from the band’s 1994 debut album that generated heavy interest about the group.

Music critics were quick to dismiss Sponge as a Stone Temple Pilots ripoff almost a decade ago. But Scott Weiland and company don’t sound like “Wax Ecstatic.” And the “grunge” label — a worthless term tossed around in the 1990s to describe almost any rock music that employed distorted guitar — doesn’t encapsulate the ultra-catchy arpeggios and haunting lyrics of “Molly.”

Muskegon graduate student Amber Fonner said she wasn’t too familiar with Sponge, but their sound impressed her. “They had a lot of people come out, and I heard there were a lot of people excited about them,” she said.

Rounding out the bill were the bands Molly, a power punk-pop band from Grand Rapids, and Bludroot, opening the show.

Of course, Sponge fired off the hits “Molly,” “Plowed,” “Have You Seen Mary” without straying from new material, such as “Treat Me Wrong,” “28 Days” and “Punch in the Nose.”

The audience soaked it up, too, chanting “Detroit rock” followed by another word that rhymes with “truckers” before the group played two songs as an encore.

Sponge is proof that a band can survive the “love-’em-and-leave-’em” ethos of MTV and the radio dial. Look no farther than their performance at Rubbles for confirmation.