Say Anything, Modern Baseball, and friends captivate Electric Factory

The band Say Anything, which played the Electric Factory on Sunday, borrowed its name from

Say Anything

- the 1989 late-teen romance film by Cameron Crowe. When a band does something like that, it will forever be expected to deliver an exceptional level of risk-taking drama.

The film is famous for the scene in which John Cusack's character, in a last-ditch effort to win the heart of his high school crush, desperately but defiantly lifts an enormous boom box above his head and blasts Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" outside her bedroom window.

Such drama is no easy demand for a 15-year-old pop punk band to meet, but Say Anything did it last year with its wonderful sixth album, Hebrews. How? By abandoning the heroic, screaming electric guitars - the not-so-secret weapons that have defined the Los Angeles band's sound for years - and replacing them with orchestral arrangements. Goodbye, Strat and Telecaster; hello, cello and French horn.

On Sunday, Say Anything brought the best of both sonic worlds when it performed with a string quartet and, yes, also with the mighty electric guitars their devotees know and love.

The night began with sets by Hard Girls and Cymbals Eat Guitars, but the most striking opener was Modern Baseball. The swiftly rising Philadelphia pop-punk band's latest album, You're Gonna Miss It All, showed that its college-aged members grew up absorbing the self-deprecating charm of Say Anything's finest tunes.

Modern Baseball played the home field advantage well, attracting frenetic fans who swarmed the stage and shouted every word to every song. There were some sloppy moments, but the set - which included a brief cover of Sublime's "Santeria" and guitarist Brendan Lukens' teasing licks from Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child O' Mine" - was about fun, not accuracy.

The string quartet was already onstage when the lights dimmed and the members of Say Anything ran out to thunderous applause. They pounced into "John McClane," the Die Hard hero-referencing opening track of Hebrews, and the energy remained explosive throughout. The set relied mostly on older favorites, such as "Woe" and "Wow, I Can Get Sexual Too."

As on Hebrews, the strings added enjoyable new dimensions of texture and character. But it was never the instrumentation that made Say Anything a captivatingly dramatic band - it was always charismatic singer Max Bemis. Unafraid of honesty, he flourishes as a performer when he is most vulnerable, which is nearly every time he opens his mouth.

He conquered the Electric Factory, shaking his hips, striking silly poses, and sprinting across the stage, sometimes wrapping his microphone cord around bandmates' feet. When he howled - whether about taking a vacation from his gender ("John McClane"), hating Mother Nature ("Hate Everyone"), or the moral vacuity of contemporary indie rock ("Judas Decapitation") - it was with so much power and passion it seemed as if his throat would split open or his head would pop off.

Bemis took several breaks from the action, dropping out for a few bars and letting the predominantly under-21 crowd do the singing for him. "In the quiet of the classrooms," they shouted, "all across the stacked United States of woe. Woe. We live in woe."

Oh, the drama!