Aging nu-metallers, your time is now. Dust off your baseball caps, camouflage shorts and ass-kicking boots and prepare to whine your parental dissatisfaction to the world once more: Alien Ant
Farm are set to play their entire 2001 debut album ‘ANThology’ on a UK tour next year. Yes, the trend of playing nostalgic full album gigs and tours has caught up to the sports-metal era. Last
year Linkin Park performed ‘Hybrid Theory’ in its entirety at Download while Korn played their self-titled 1994 debut front to back in London in July. Who knows, before long we might get to
savour the full banquet of Limp Bizkit’s 'Chocolate Starfish...' served up with all the hot dog flavoured water we can drink.
Of course, nu-metal isn't the first genre to reel in the nostalgia dollar with artists recreating their landmark records from start to finish. Since the practice was popularised by the Don’t Look Back series of annual shows between 2005 and 2012, at which All Tomorrow’s Parties asked the likes of Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, The Lemonheads and Belle & Sebastian to recreate seminal albums in full, the complete album gig has become the mark of the cult band with a devoted long-term fanbase.
Of course, nu-metal isn't the first genre to reel in the nostalgia dollar with artists recreating their landmark records from start to finish. Since the practice was popularised by the Don’t Look Back series of annual shows between 2005 and 2012, at which All Tomorrow’s Parties asked the likes of Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, The Lemonheads and Belle & Sebastian to recreate seminal albums in full, the complete album gig has become the mark of the cult band with a devoted long-term fanbase.
Often, they’re a phenomenal experience – Spiritualized playing ‘Ladies And Gentlemen…’, Pixies doing ‘Doolittle’, the Manics’ ‘The Holy Bible’ tour or Magnetic Fields’ immense two-nighter
of ’69 Love Songs’. In an age when the joy of not knowing which songs your favourite band will play has been thoroughly wilted by setlist.fm, this is a different form of live enjoyment – a
time-leap to idyllic times, an appreciation of the 45-minute ‘journey’ of the album format and the relief of knowing exactly when to pop to the bog during the shit filler bits.
Some acts – Suede, The Wedding Present, The Wonder Stuff, The Cure, acts from the days when ‘indie’ was an obsessive lifestyle choice rather than a sniffy term of abuse for The Pigeon Detectives – have taken the concept a stage further and recreated virtually their entire careers in order, playing shows or tours of each album in quick succession and making the hardcore fan feel like they’re living their twenties again in fast-forward. Others – Patti Smith, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Weezer, Nas – have recently been using the format to cement their greatest or most overlooked albums as solid gold classics. Only this weekend, Kanye brought to life the icy sounds of his divisive '808s...' in full at a show in Los Angeles, to the delight of fans for whom that's his tender, soul-purging pinnacle.
Naysayers call these shows money-grabbing and backwards-facing. Bloc Party last year launched a fight back against these types of shows, as the 10th anniversary of their 'Silent Alarm' debut loomed. "I always cringe a little bit when you hear about bands going around just touring on a kind of anniversary record," Kele Okereke told a reporter, when asked if they'd be revisiting the record live to mark the milestone. "I feel that it just seems a little bit cynical.” Others accuse the full album set trend of ruining festivals, killing off the greatest hits set and boring all the apparently goldfish-like culture-gobbling millennials who, we’re so often told, exist on a diet of mashed up Spotify playlists and go into anaphylactic shock if played more than one song by the same artist in a row. But the meteoric rise of vinyl sales suggests otherwise; the album is back back back, and the full album gigs are its victory lap.
Some acts – Suede, The Wedding Present, The Wonder Stuff, The Cure, acts from the days when ‘indie’ was an obsessive lifestyle choice rather than a sniffy term of abuse for The Pigeon Detectives – have taken the concept a stage further and recreated virtually their entire careers in order, playing shows or tours of each album in quick succession and making the hardcore fan feel like they’re living their twenties again in fast-forward. Others – Patti Smith, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Weezer, Nas – have recently been using the format to cement their greatest or most overlooked albums as solid gold classics. Only this weekend, Kanye brought to life the icy sounds of his divisive '808s...' in full at a show in Los Angeles, to the delight of fans for whom that's his tender, soul-purging pinnacle.
Naysayers call these shows money-grabbing and backwards-facing. Bloc Party last year launched a fight back against these types of shows, as the 10th anniversary of their 'Silent Alarm' debut loomed. "I always cringe a little bit when you hear about bands going around just touring on a kind of anniversary record," Kele Okereke told a reporter, when asked if they'd be revisiting the record live to mark the milestone. "I feel that it just seems a little bit cynical.” Others accuse the full album set trend of ruining festivals, killing off the greatest hits set and boring all the apparently goldfish-like culture-gobbling millennials who, we’re so often told, exist on a diet of mashed up Spotify playlists and go into anaphylactic shock if played more than one song by the same artist in a row. But the meteoric rise of vinyl sales suggests otherwise; the album is back back back, and the full album gigs are its victory lap.