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| SOUTH BEND, INDIANA REVIEW by JACK WALTON Tribune Correspondent SOUTH BEND -- The basketball court in IUSB's Student Activities Center transformed into a rock and roll dancefloor Friday night, as Blessid Union of Souls and Frickin' A played a double bill of energetic music. Frickin' A was welcomed with thunderous applause, particularly from young girls. The charismatic Cincinnati band played a set of uptempo, punk-influenced pop, with a strong emphasis on comedy. Many of Frickin' A's songs are humorous tales of breakups, and the group highlighted several such tunes Friday, including "Drive" and "Dump Me." A cover of Rick Springfield's "Jessie's Girl" is what catapulted Frickin' A into the rock spotlight this year, and the live version prompted most of the crowd to salute the band with the standard rock greeting, the two-fingered "devil horns." Two other campy 80s hits were lampooned as well. Bryan Adams' "Summer of '69" and Billy Squier's "Everybody Wants You" also were recast into Frickin' A songs, played in a heavy new wave style. Singer Jason Phelps engaged the crowd throughout the act, pausing to read fans' notes thrown onto the stage and singing "Happy Birthday" to guitarist Dave Harris. Phelps also had a guitar with a contraption that launched toilet paper into the air over the audience. Towards the end of the show, Frickin' A cracked up the crowd with a cover version of Britney Spears' dance song, "...Baby One More Time," played as a guitar-driven rocker. Most of the rest of the songs were from the band's latest release, "Big Egos...No Ideas." The group retreated to the merchandise booth after the show, and were still signing autographs and posing for pictures with fans nearly two hours later. An afternoon appearance at Orbit Music & Video in Mishawaka was a similar success. Headliners Blessid Union of Souls, platinum sellers in the mid-90s, have returned after a sabbatical with the recording of "Perception," their first release since 2001. Eliot Sloan, the band's leader, announced how pleased he was to see fans singing along to songs that many were hearing for the first time. The set balanced familiar hits from a decade ago with new tunes from "Perception." Sloan played the piano for slower songs, like "I Still Believe in Love," and when the bands' two guitarists traded licks on their vintage Gibson guitars, they emerged with a sound reminiscent of the Allman Brothers. The biggest surprise during Blessid Union of Souls' performance came when they launched into Queen's classic "Bohemian Rhapsody," an arrangement so complicated that even Queen had difficulty reproducing it in a live setting. "See if you guys know this one," said Sloan before delivering an uncanny Freddie Mercury impersonation. Other crowd-pleasers included two renditions of the band's biggest hit, "I Believe." First, Sloan sang and played the song by himself at the piano, and the group reprised the song later, with a fully electric version. An instrumental cover of Led Zeppelin's "How Many More Times" provided the musicians a chance to rock even harder, sending some fans into a headbanging frenzy. Frickin' A's "Big Egos...No Ideas" is currently in stores, and Blessid Union of Souls' "Perception" will be released May 3. |