Story of the Year performs at Concord Music Hall in Chicago on Jan. 26, 2024.
One of the more welcome trends in live music over the last few years is when bands tour because it’s the 20th anniversary of one of their landmark albums. For the last few years, anyone whose formative years were between 2001-2005 or so have been absolutely spoiled.
Post-hardcore emo veterans Story of the Year hopped onto this craze in late 2023, kicking off the first leg of their tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of their major label debut Page Avenue. Touring from August through November of last year, the band took a break for the holidays and came back for the final leg of the tour this month. Pulling into Chicago’s Concord Music Hall for the final stop of the tour with We The Kings and Youth Fountain as support, the bar was set pretty high for a band revisiting material that they’ve had both 20 years to perfect and 5 months to hone as a live act.
Youth Fountain performs at Concord Music Hall in Chicago on Jan. 26, 2024.
When putting together a tour celebrating one of the more fondly-remembered melodic post-hardcore emo records to come out of the early 2000s, the supporting acts need to be able to rise to the occasion. Fortunately for the sold out crowd at Concord Music Hall, Youth Fountain proved to be more than up to the challenge, with a tight half-hour set of punk melodies for fans of bands like Driveways and Hot Mulligan. The Canadian pop punk project, fronted by Tyler Zanon, delivered a potent combination of angst-driven lyrics with bright melodies and thrashing riffs.
Next up on the night was We the Kings. Best known for their 2007 platinum smash hit “Check Yes, Juliet” and coming off playing When We Were Young festival last year (aka the who’s who of the emo world), We the Kings made the most of their eight song set. Touching on fan favorites from the blistering opener “Skyway Avenue” to ballads like “Sad Song,” the band played with the energy and stage presence usually reserved for a slot closing down a festival stage. We the Kings seemed determined to leave everything they had onstage, in some cases literally with singer/guitarist Travis Clark absolutely pouring sweat during the first three songs of the band’s set, during which he promised to wear the bulky Chicago Bears sweater he adorned.
We the Kings perform at Concord Music Hall in Chicago on Jan. 26, 2024.
When these “we’re getting back together to play this 20 year old album” tours come through town, there’s naturally some amount of trepidation. Even the best bands in the world can lose a step or two over the span of two decades. Sometimes songs have to be moved down a key or two to fit in an aging singer’s range. Even the songs themselves can be subject to just plain not aging well, lyrically or sonically.
If anyone in the capacity crowd had those worries, they were absolutely thrown out the window from the moment the first explosive measures of “And the Hero Will Drown” kicked in. With the force and energy of men decades younger than their current age, frontman Dan Marsala and the rest of the band ripped through Page Avenue (as well as a few of their newer songs and a kickass medley of mid-2000s emo hits) sounding exactly like they did in the studio and with the intensity and connection you wouldn’t expect from a band that has played these songs thousands of times over dozens of years. Hearing their newer songs fit in so well next to tracks off their debut album only builds anticipation for whatever project the band comes up with as a follow-up to last year’s Tear Me To Pieces.
Story of the Year performs at Concord Music Hall in Chicago on Jan. 26, 2024.
As most bands do during these shows that include an album playthrough, Story of the Year switched up the order of the songs to not only introduce a little variety and unpredictability to the night, but to make sure they didn’t burn through their biggest hits within the first 20 minutes of the show. And while both Page Avenue and the rest of Story of the Year’s catalog are littered with hits, it didn’t take a genius to assume they would close the show with “Until the Day I Die,” the biggest hit off their biggest album. And as the final notes of the smash hit faded into the night and the band wrapped up the final song of the final stop of the tour, it proved to be the perfect re-introduction (and possible goodbye) to one of the most important emo albums of the 21st century.
Check out photos of Story of the Year, We the Kings and Youth Fountain performing at Concord Music Hall below. More information about Story of the Year can be found at Storyoftheyear.net.
(Photos and review by Rich Funk)
