THE DARKNESS at the Phoenix. Wednesday, Feb 1. See listing.
Looking over Billboard’s most popular songs of 2011, you can’t help but be struck by how little commercial impact rock music is making on the charts these days. The only guitar music that does seem to be selling at all is super-earnest folk rock that equates acoustic guitars with authenticity.
However, everything goes in cycles, which could make the comeback of flamboyant over-the-top cock rockers the Darkness more plausible than it seems at first (after all, no-frills grunge did lead to theatrical electroclash).
Their Toronto show tonight at the Phoenix is sold out, but the band is running some kind of scavenger hunt from their Twitter account that will reward some fans with some free tickets (the first step is to show up at the Phoenix at 3 pm today with a Darkness “shirt, CD, handmade sign, ect”, at which point you’ll get your second clue).
That’s not the only thing the recently reformed rockers are giving away today – they’ve also posted a free MP3 of their new single Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us (no relation to the Jefferson Starship song of the same name, despite the similarities in hairstyle). They’ve also dropped a video for the tune, which continues to add to the ongoing confusion as to whether they’re a parody act or not.
It remains to be seen if lead singer Justin Hawkins will still put on a gleefully ridiculous live show post-rehab, but they definitely had no problem making the Phoenix feel like a stadium back in 2004.
