Sunday night, Frank Black played the second night of his two-night run at Metro, both to a packed house. It was an excellent reason to stay out on a School night. If that wasn’t enough, the opening band for these shows was also a huge treat!
Original Chicago punk band, Verböten were up first. For those not aware, this band was part of the early Chicago scene and started in 1982 when they were like 12 years old! They recently started playing again about 40 years later and played at the last Riot Fest. Jason Narducy, most famous these days for being in Bob Mould’s band plays guitar and is one of the two vocalists in this band. They never put out a record while they were an active band back then. They played a handful of their old songs, but they also played some really great new songs and announced they have an album out now! As good as they were at Riot Fest, they were even better this time out and the new stuff sounded great! What a treat it was to have the reunite, and even better that they made a record! They were fantastic!
I’m not sure how this happened but Frank Black’s album, Teenager Of The Year, has somehow turned 30 years old and this tour he’s currently on is a celebration of that major milestone. Frank reunited the original band who played on that record to hit the road to perform it in its entirety. It’s always pretty special when a band celebrates a major recors by playing the whole album live, and its often the only chance you’ll get to see them perform some of the deep cuts from it that they normally wouldn’t play.
When Frank and the band took the stage, they ended up having to delay starting quite a bit due to a monitor problem. While they stage crew were trying to solve it, Frank entertained the audience with some stories and witty banter. He was really quite amusing, especially because he was put on the spot having to fill the time needed to fix the technical problem and it was much appreciated that he did that instead of having them all leave the stage again and make everyone wait.
When they sorted out the issue, Frank said they were going to play a couple of songs before they play the album in order. The band then played “Czar”. They sounded great and the crowd was into it. They followed up with “Ten Percenter” and then it was time for Teenager Of The Year. Starting with “Whatever Happened to Pong”, the band played the entire album in the proper sequence and it sounded pretty amazing. The playing was great, Frank’s singing was on par, and the general vibe coming off that stage was they were having a good time performing that album. Not one for small talk, Frank was surprisingly chatty at times, and other times they would immediately go from one song to the next with barely a breath between them.
Teenager Of The Year is not a short album, it is a double album that clocks in at 22 songs! The performance of that was pretty close to flawless and they easily kept the audience’s attention the entire time. If that wasn’t enough, they played an additional three songs to finish the evening off, including one of Franks’ best know hits, “Los Angeles”. It was a nice dessert to the quality main course we got with the album performance, and overall it was a show that was more than worth attending for everyone from the casual fan to the most hardcore.
