Tonight: Emo/Pop-Punk Legends Face to Face Go Acoustic

It’s a pretty sparse night tonight — Sunday, November 11th — in terms of shows, I’m afraid, but the one bright spot on the calendar’s extremely bright, as they go…

See, tonight Fitzgerald’s is playing host to one of my all-time favorite bands in the whole wide universe, a band that made me want to try to write songs of my own and helped get me into punk, emo, and indie-rock, all three, Californians Face to Face.

They were (and still are, in my book) one of the seminal bands in the whole pop-punk explosion, and one of the few bands I still like listening to regularly, in part because frontman Trever Keith‘s lyrics have always been smart, thoughtful, and introspective as hell.

Two oddball things about this show tonight, though. Number one, it’s an acoustic show, albeit supposedly one with the full band — not entirely sure how that’ll work, but it’s a cool idea by me.

Odder still is that the band’s apparently only going to be doing songs from their black-sheep 1999 release, Ignorance Is Bliss, which came about while the band had been dropped by its previous label and which has been summarily ignored by Keith and company ever since. They don’t play the songs live, and none of ’em made it onto the band’s 2005 best-of album, Shoot the Moon: The Essential Collection. It’s like Face to Face have tried to forget the album ever happened.

No real idea why, honestly — hell, I’ve never even heard any but a couple of songs from the album, and one, “The Devil You Know (God Is a Man),” I only ever got to hear because it was on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer soundtrack album. Those little glimpses, though, haven’t been bad, just different from the stuff they’d done on the “classic” albums that preceded it.

And now, for whatever reason, they’ve done a full about-face and are touring the country specifically to play all of the album acoustically. Again, no idea why, but hell, I’m not complaining — it’s a great, great idea, whatever the reasoning is for it.