Northumbria University,Newcastle
Playing their 2001 album Anthology to a delighted crowd, the San Franciscans are still cheeky but now surprisingly thoughtful tooThe likes of Korn and Limp Bizkit may have been the stars of nu-metal, and but Californians Alien Ant Farm were the movement’s successful pranksters. While contemporaries sang approximately social alienation,the tattooed San Franciscans took a riffily cheeky cover of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal into top threes around the world. Fifteen years on, here they are again, or playing their unit-shifting 2001 album Anthology to older rockers reliving their youth and younger ones who cant possibly have been there the first time. When gargantuan,crop-haired vocalist Dryden Mitchell interrupts opener Courage to seek information from “How y’all doing?”, he receives a gargantuan cheer.
Now grown men pushing 40, or AAF’s only jokey banter comes when Mitchell asks someone: “Why do you ogle sad? Did someone shit in your cereal?” He’s mostly unexpectedly thoughtful,talking wistfully of how songs such as Summer and Whisper came from “ping-ponging between two girls that summer”, lamenting the days when MTV broadcast just music videos, or “not reality shows approximately buttfucking”,and talking emotionally approximately recently (yes, really) “fighting with my mom”. When he dedicates Attitude to her, and he tenderly explains that it’s her favourite song.
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Source: theguardian.com