Alkaline Trio, Against Me! Live

Alkaline Trio, Against Me!
Metro, Chicago
Thursday, May 4, 2006

Now that two-thirds of the band live outside Chicago, Alkaline Trio’s homecoming shows truly are homecomings. To celebrate the end of one leg of their latest tour, they spun off three sold-out shows at Metro with Against Me! and basked in the adulation as much as death-n-drinkin’ obsessees can.

Victory laps, however, aren’t always the best shows. The benefit homer crowds reap is the band’s trust — they can get away with the older material, resulting in a looser set. The obvious flipside is it isn’t going to be a very inspired performance. And that was about where Alkaline Trio found themselves Thursday, plucking songs out of their 10-year-old catalog knowing full well the adoring audience would sing each word right back. But they sacrificed the tenacity that punk bands need to build audiences in the first place.

The choice to use the Metro could be seen as a concession to an intimacy-starved fanbase, who have seen their heroes graduate to larger arenas. But it could also be seen as a failure to adapt to the bigger rooms (they’ve been swallowed by the Riviera on a couple occasions). Whatever the deal, someone forget to tell Derek Grant and his drum tech to tone it down, as his kit engulfed most of the songs and rendered Matt Skiba’s guitar virtually inaudible from beyond 20 feet. Skiba’s amplifiers are routinely culprits in live environs, yet when it came time for his solo spots, his acoustic was frighteningly crisp.

Playing the entirety of their debut album, 1998’s Goddamnit, was another thank-you-fans gesture, as were their costume-party get-ups: Dan Adriano decked out in a devil’s black-and-red tuxedo shirt and Skiba dressed like a malnourished Christopher Lloyd in a policeman’s outfit. Celebrations continued with an impromptu “Happy Birthday” to Skiba’s balcony-stationed father and rendition of “Blue In The Face,” reworked as a tribute to Johnny Cash and June Carter (it was the first of several bizarre dedications, with “Dead And Broken” sent out to Laci Peterson’s family; Ben Weasel and Jeremy Jacobs were also paid “respect”).

Despite the eccentricities, the 30-song affair was rather flat. Since undisputed frontman Skiba got to do a solo set, Adriano and Grant were allotted equal time for a flaccid batch of their own, and the interminable trading of vocal duties made it easy to paint Skiba as the pent-up, rageaholic and Adriano as the Smoking Popes acolyte with a boner for midtempo classic rock. It’s an attribute that — along with the black-and-red, Misfits-lite thing — has gone from characteristic to schtick to going through the motions. Even if it’s done in the name of the fans, it isn’t doing anyone a whole lotta good.

Against Me!, on the other hand, came as unpackaged as possible. Squished between the lip of the stage and Alkaline Trio’s gigantic drum station, the quartet made do by stomping their anthemic, workingman’s punk at a steamroller’s pace. The Florida-based band got to push what it could of last fall’s Searching For A Former Clarity, though it was the exploration of band/music/fan disconnects (“Don’t Lose Touch”) that served as a subtle warning to the headliner and their legions.

— Steve Forstneger

Category: Live Reviews, Weekly