Craig Owens of Chiodos and Geoff Rickly of Thursday perform at Stage West in Scranton on Aug. 19
From a press release:
Fans of the post-hardcore music of the early 2000s Warped Tour era are in for a special night when Craig Owens of Chiodos and Geoff Rickly of Thursday come to Stage West in Scranton, appropriately on Thursday, Aug. 19.
Special guest Nate Bergman of Lionize will open the all-ages show. Owens, who appeared at Screaming Infidelities: Emo Night at Stage West in 2019, will play selections from his other projects like D.R.U.G.S. (Destroy Rebuild Until God Shows), Cinematic Sunrise, and more in addition to his Chiodos songs.
Doors at Stage West (301 N. Main Ave., Scranton) open at 6 p.m., and the concert starts at 7 p.m. Tickets, which are $25 in advance, are on sale now via Prekindle. Screaming Infidelities is currently offering a promo code for $5 off each ticket – use the code EMO at checkout to activate the discount.
At the end of the month, they will perform at Stage West’s second location at State College on Monday, Aug. 30 at 7 p.m. Tickets for that show are also on sale now via Prekindle.
Formed in 2001 in Davison, Michigan just outside Flint, Chiodos initially released two full-length studio albums with lead vocalist Craig Owens, resulting in sales of over 500,000 units and 740,000 digital tracks in North America alone. “All’s Well That End’s Well” (2005) debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard Heatseekers Chart, and “Bone Palace Ballet” (2007) debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard Top 200 Chart and No. 1 on the Billboard Independent, Alternative, Rock, and Hard Rock Charts.
During a brief time apart from Chiodos, Owens formed/played with new band D.R.U.G.S. and Chiodos released their third album, “Illuminaudio,” in 2010. Owens reunited with Chiodos in early 2012, played a handful of high-profile U.S. shows, and toured the U.K. in early 2013 as part of an annual Kerrang Magazine branded tour. The band released their fourth and final studio album, “Devil,” on April 1, 2014. It debuted at No. 12 on the Billboard 200 with more than 18,000 copies sold during the first week and went on to sell more than 100,000 copies worldwide.
Chiodos has graced the covers of Alternative Press three times and have received accolades worldwide, praising the band’s innovative and exhilarating sound. The band has toured extensively headlining the world over, as well as touring with bands such as Linkin Park, Coheed and Cambria, Nine Inch Nails, Alice in Chains, The Devil Wears Prada, Bad Religion, and many more.
Thursday has been in a constant state of transition. Rising from New Brunswick, New Jersey in the midst of a DIY basement culture revival, they seemed out of step with the traditional hardcore of their peers. Favoring jagged post-punk rhythms over metallic breakdowns and quoting from Neil Young and post-modern poet Michael Palmer instead of Henry Rollins and Noam Chomsky, the band always seemed at odds with the awkwardly applied label of “post-hardcore pioneers.” With this starting point, they set out wildly to find their place in the world, touring with everyone from The Cure to Cursive and continually expanding and refining their musical vocabulary. Finally, with their sixth and last album, “No Devolución,” the transition feels complete – Thursday has arrived at a place like home.
When Thursday – fronted by singer Geoff Rickly, guitarists Tom Keeley and Steve Pedulla, bassist Tim Payne, drummer Tucker Rule, and keyboardist Andrew Everding – released their second album, “Full Collapse,” in 2001, it defined a genre, signaled a change of the guard, and started a backlash all at once. Spin hailed the band as “The Next Big Thing,” featuring Rickly on its cover in 2004. Kerrang praised the band with five Ks (their highest marks) as being “in an entirely different class” than anything else at their Reading Festival debut.
Thursday’s first album for the majors, “War All the Time,” was a critical and commercial success but left the band feeling stuck and uninspired. Instead of embracing the musical niche that they had carved out, they took a far more daring route – shaking off trends in favor of experimentation, forging identity from content rather than style and turning Thursday into a churning engine of reinvention. The New York Times concluded, “They may not be rock stars, but by a kind of critical consensus they have emerged as the standard-bearers for their sound, the band considered most likely to survive the vagaries of rock trend-hopping.”
Throughout the band’s subsequent releases, a theme began to emerge – nothing is sacred. Calling on the legendary Flaming Lips’ producer, Dave Fridmann, the band delivered a pair of records that eschewed popular perception. 2006’s “A City by the Light Divided” saw Thursday producing heavily distorted lullabies and introspective dirges. 2009’s “Common Existence” showed them at their most explosive, adding atmosphere and precision to the urgency of their earlier records. In the midst of these two releases, Thursday teamed up for a split LP with venerated Japanese screamo band Envy, producing a seamless suite of tracks entitled, “As He Climbed a Dark Mountain, In Silence, An Absurd and Unrealistic Dream of Peace Appeared and Was Gone.”
“There is literally nothing that I’ve ever experienced that comes close to being in a room and watching the musicians in Thursday write together,” Rickly said, crediting the band’s chemistry on the steadiness and endurance of its lineup. “It’s too powerful and immediate for us to walk away from.”
Released through Epitaph Records in 2011, “No Devolución” came out 10 years after Thursday’s landmark album, “Full Collapse,” and provided a powerful touchstone for the future of the band.
“This isn’t a hardcore record,” Rickly noted at the time. “It’s not punk. But it’s a Thursday record and it might be our best.”
