My Chemical Romance tribute band plays Emo Night at Stage West in Scranton on April 17
From a press release:
It was announced today that Screaming Infidelities: Emo Night will return to Stage West in Scranton on Friday, April 17 with a live My Chemical Romance tribute band. This event is the local group’s answer to the recent MCR ticketing controversy.
“In our emo world, everyone was hyped for the My Chemical Romance reunion tour, myself included. We’ve been waiting a decade for it. Well, the tickets went on sale last week and the bots bought most of them immediately. By the time I got there, I was looking at $1,000+ for anything decent and $500+ for nose bleed tickets,” noted Joe Caviston, one-half of Screaming Infidelities.
“So we decided to do something for all the sane people that couldn’t get tickets or wouldn’t pay those prices. We created a My Chemical Romance tribute band that will put on a concert during our Emo Night at Stage West. We’re talking marching band uniforms, face paint – the whole nine yards.”
The tribute band will be made up of Scranton alternative rock group The Boastfuls with the addition of Stefan Ogonosky of Blinded Passenger and Goodnight, Captain, along with more surprise guests. The Boastfuls recently premiered their first single, “Tequila,” on NEPA Scene and packed Stage West for their release show.
“I’m actually excited for this one. I dig ‘The Black Parade,'” added DJ Hersh, the other half of Screaming Infidelities, referring to the band’s third album that went triple-platinum following its 2006 release.
Screaming Infidelities: Emo Night provides a one-of-a-kind experience that encourages crowd interaction and features its fair share of confetti cannons. While co-founders Hersh and Caviston spin cult classic emo, pop punk, punk, and indie rock tunes, the crowd is encouraged to dance, sing along, and fans are even invited on stage to live out their rock star dreams.
The DJ duo, who have capitalized on the national trend of “emo nights” since their debut at the 2017 Electric City Music Conference, has seen success at several different venues with their perfect playlists and big sing-a-longs, selling out both The Bog and Stage West in Scranton, along with Senunas’ Bar & Grill in Wilkes-Barre and the River Street Jazz Cafe in Plains, on multiple occasions.
They also took their show on the road, performing to capacity crowds in Lancaster, Reading, and Southampton. Along the way, they’ve added opening slots for local bands with sounds in the vein of emo, pop punk, and indie rock and shared stages with Craig Owens of Chiodos, William Ryan Key of Yellowcard, Chris “Fronz” Fronzak of Attila, Boys of Fall, and Josh Balz, former keyboardist of Scranton metal band Motionless In White and current owner of The Strange and Unusual Oddities Parlor in Kingston and Philadelphia.
To warm-up for their next Stage West date, the group will throw Emo Nights at the Khyber Pass Pub in Philadelphia on April 11 and Tellus360 in Lancaster on March 27; their previous Tellus360 show saw over 650 people in attendance.
Then Screaming Infidelities and the new My Chemical Romance tribute comes to Stage West (301 N. Main Ave., Scranton) on April 17. Tickets, which are $10, are on sale now and available online via Evenbrite or at the door. The 21+ event starts at 8 p.m.
Formed in Newark, New Jersey, My Chemical Romance made its debut in 2002 with the independently released album “I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love.” Led by vocalist Gerard Way, the band signed to Reprise Records the following year and made its major label debut with 2004’s “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge,” now certified triple platinum. The album contained the platinum hit “I’m Not Okay (I Promise),” the gold-certified “Helena,” and “The Ghost of You.”
Rolling Stone hailed “The Black Parade” as one of the top albums of 2006. Lead single “Welcome to the Black Parade” topped both Billboard’s Alternative Songs tally and the U.K. Official Singles chart and is now triple platinum. The band toured extensively behind the album – appearing as characters from “The Black Parade” – and released the live album “The Black Parade is Dead!” in 2008. “Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys” was released in 2010 and topped Billboard’s Alternative Albums and Top Rock Albums charts. It was followed by a series of singles later released as “Conventional Weapons” in 2013.
My Chemical Romance’s songs continue to rack up half a billion cumulative global streams each year. The band’s Top 3 music videos have amassed more than 100 million views each on VEVO. After performing a sold-out show at the landmark Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Dec. 20, 2019, they announced a full U.S. tour beginning on Sept. 9 in Detroit, Michigan and finishing on Oct. 11 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The uncompromising rock group previously announced multiple overseas performances for March, including shows in Milton Keynes, England, two of which sold out (130,000 tickets) in under an hour.
After an almost seven-year hiatus, MCR’s U.S.-based fans, dubbed Killjoys, have been left anxiously waiting for a reunion, so when tickets went on sale on Jan. 31, they sold out almost instantly, selling 228,600 tickets in under six hours. However, thousands of fans waiting in online Ticketmaster queues could not buy tickets at face value, and prices have quickly skyrocketed, resulting in criticism of Ticketmaster and its “dynamic pricing” system as much as typical scalpers and their bots.
See NEPA Scene’s photos of The Boastfuls’ “Tequila” release show at Stage West in December here and watch the band perform live in Episode 3 of the new Stripped acoustic series below:
