Comeback tour. Nothing is more terrifying and thrilling, more potentially awesome or potentially problematic, than learning that a band you loved ten years ago is getting back together for another round.
Oh, LFO. In 1999, I heard the song "Summer Girls" (you know: "I like girls that wear Abercrombie and Fitch/I'd take her if I had one wish/She's been gone since that summer, since that summer") and assumed that they were a boy-band spoof. The cheery bubbliness and standard-saccharine-summer sound paired with the non-sequitur and sometimes weirdly personal lyrics? It could not be real; it was too perfect to exist. And, at the same time that I was falling in love with Christopher Guest films, I fell in love with LFO. I mean, really: how can you NOT love a boy-band that sings "Sometimes we swim around like two dolphins in the ocean of our hearts!" It was glorious boy-band parody and paired delightfully with my rapidly-growing appreciation for clever music in general.
I found out, many years later: LFO is not parody.
Oops. Too late: I was hooked, and if I couldn't laugh with them, I'd keep laughing by myself. Knowing that they weren't in on my joke did not make the music any less enjoyable, and it IS enjoyable music--the hooks are catchy as all hell, the voices aren't bad, and as I said, the lyrics just kill me.
When I found out that LFO was going to launch their comeback tour in Atlanta--their first public performance as LFO in eight years!--I bought a ticket instantly. But as the day of the concert came, I found out a few unsettling things: One, the ticket price had been dropped from $25 to $5, which could not possibly bode well for how many tickets had already been sold. Two, the venue was Heaven at the Masquerade, a fantastic, fascinating venue but one whose bread-and-butter is metal and hardcore shows, not peak-in-the-nineties radio pop. Three, I'd checked out the MySpace pages of a couple of the opening bands, and had recoiled at what I'd heard. And four, they'd performed that morning on a morning-news-in-Atlanta show, and they sounded awful, bad-karaoke awful. Trepidatiously, I parked at the Masq, found beer, and showed myself in.
I showed up just as the very first act, Kiernan McMullan, was finishing. He's a shaggy blonde kid that looks like every crush you ever had in high school, and I regret missing his set: although his Jack-Johnson style doesn't stylistically hold my interest, he had genuine guitar chops and a decent voice, and from what I heard (his last two songs), he was worlds better than the other two opening bands. Several girls in the audience (about 20 people total at this point) knew his lyrics were singing along to his songs, a good sign for him. He'd later rejoin the stage to play guitar and sing back-up for LFO.
The next two bands, Go Crash Audio and Rookie of the Year, were completely interchangeable and both pretty awful. I hung to the back of the room for Go Crash Audio's set, wherein the vocalist's increasingly whiny cries for the handful of people in the cavernous room to "Get excited!" and "C'mon dance!" were slightly less off-putting. I moved up into the audience for Rookie of the Year, to be in-place for LFO, and observed that the lead singer for Rookie of the Year wears his mullet sideways. This is a completely fair description: Business on the right, party on the left. Rookie of the Year, despite playing very basic, standard-issue emo-pop, had six members, four of whom played guitar simultaneously. Here's a riddle: Why would any band need four guitarists and a bassist to play that style of music? The riddle's natural answer: each of them only knows one chord.
(To whichever members of Go Crash Audio and Rookie of the Year are in charge of obsessive self-Googling: Sorry dears. I recognize that I am not your target audience.)
LFO's backing band (a full ensemble of guitars, bass, drums, keys, and synth) took the stage, and then LFO--the three singers, the three guys that comprise the entity of LFO--leapt onto stage, to the cheers of dozens of girls! (I looked behind me. "Dozens" is correct, between 60 and 100 people. The room can hold 1500.)
If they were put off by the small crowd, they did an excellent job of not showing it, launching into a very high-energy set. They sounded much better than they had on the morning show--they sounded like LFO!
And they looked fine, actually. (You always worry, on the comeback tour, whether a band will try to pull off their old look, or if they'll succeed.) The only one I know by name is Rich Cronin; he's beaten a rare, particularly nasty form of leukemia in the last few years, and his bouncing back into stage performance is a genuinely admirable achievement. His performance was less explosively athletic than his bandmates', and he performed in sunglasses to mask a less-than-summery pallor, but he got his job done. The other two dudes, muscular and tattooed and high-energy, spent the set leaping onto amps, playing air-guitar, and dropping to their knees to sing into the eyes of the most Abercrombie girls in the front row.
And they sounded fine, actually. Their voices aren't as youthful as they once were, but it'd have been unfair to ask that of them. Everybody was on-pitch and on-rhythm, and the backing band was very well-rehearsed and spot-on. Sort-of-hilariously, they did not remember a lot of their lyrics. There was one guy--the cute married one, as opposed to the douchey-looking one or Rich--that picked up the slack whenever the other two clearly forgot the words and stopped singing, and it happened more than a few times, including during "Summer Girls."
Highlights:
--They sang three different songs that mention the success of "Summer Girls." For those of you playing along at home, "Summer of My Life," "Story of My Life" (yes, two different songs), and "Hey Radio," the third of which I absolutely adore. At least two of their songs also referenced Rich's ex-girlfriend Jennifer Love Hewitt.
--They played every LFO song that's ever had a moment's radio play, closing with "Every Other Time" and "Summer Girls," as well as a few of my non-radio goofy favorites like "Alayna" and "Six Minutes." (If ever I am in a band, I will insist that we cover "Alayna." It is the song that perfectly encapsulates the Christopher Guest-ness ridiculous-typical-boy-band quality of the band.)
--They played "Dandelion" into "No Woman No Cry," which bizarrely worked. (Fun fact: "Dandelion" has been karaoke-covered by the illustrious musical mind of Nicole Richie. Oh, to move in the circles of the pointlessly famous.)
--One of Rich's side projects is an aptly-self-described "frat rap" duo called Loose Cannons. They did a Loose Cannons song called "Watch You Dance." Hilarious.
--About three songs into the set, I realized that the douchey-looking guy's jeans zipper was down. That's an inauspicious start to a comeback tour if ever there was one. I managed to catch his eye and make the universal gesture for "XYZ," the mime of holding a button in place with one hand while yanking up a zipper with the other. He got it, and made a show of zipping his fly on-stage. Well played-off.
The final word: I had a fantastically fun time. I was worried that it would be depressing or demoralizing, or just straight-up terrible, but LFO rose to the occasion despite the dismal turnout. They were just as enjoyable as I remembered from high school, and for exactly the same reasons: blithe cheesy cheeriness paired with whacked-out lyrics and genuinely fun hooks. I have a hard time seeing them ever doing another tour after this, but given the opportunity, I'd certainly see it again.
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