The Smoking Popes Retake Chicago
This past Friday saw a lost favorite of the Chicago rock scene quite literally Get The Band Back Together. If you spent any time at Metro, Double Door, or the offices of DKA in the late 1990s, you knew the Smoking Popes. I always thought Eric's characterization of the band was dead on: Morrissey meets the Ramones (though I've decided they're at least 10% Matthew Sweet in the Girlfriend era, which is considerably more than 100% Fun.)
The 'Popes apparently put 7 years of unreconciled differences behind them, picked up the strings, and played like old times for a raucous, rapt capacity crowd at Metro this past Friday. As the Tribune's Greg Kot observed,
[This crowd was] rewarded with a performance that offered no new songs, but that essentially picked up where the band left off in 1998. That's a good place to be, because the Popes were still on the ascent, still perfecting their sound when singer-guitarist Josh Caterer quit the band to pursue his newfound Christian faith.Whatever ill-will that departure engendered within the band appears to have long since faded. The right hands of Caterer and his brothers, guitarist Eli and bassist Matt, were mirror images of one another as they downstroked their instruments on "Before I'm Gone."
My thanks to Joe Kottke here at FeedBurner for scoring the tickets for us; word is the show sold out in 36 minutes. That's white-hot fast for a Metro show that isn't an A-list national act. Then again, most in attendance always expected the Popes would be just such a band. They played like one, cutting straight through their catalog with the crowd singing their way through every chorus. I especially liked their treatment of "Pretty Pathetic," a favorite track from Destination Failure.
If you've never seen a show at Metro, you have to add this venue to your Must Visit list. It's the perfect place to see virtually any modern rock act. No one can play too big to fit there; the space's acoustics and layout are incredibly patron-friendly (versus that "certain deathtrap" appeal of the Aragon Ballroom); and they never oversell the place to a point of total claustrophobic overload.
I trusted my P910 to capture some video from the show; it did that well enough, but you can tell its tinny microphone was no match for the amps at Metro. Hopefully these clips give you some idea of the energy they put out.
(2MB; Pretty Pathetic, plus some panoramic shots of the crowd I can't explain taking) |
 (976K; i mean, can you even hear the band over the crowd singalong?) |
 (472K; More of Pretty Pathetic, I'm fairly certain) |