Music review: Boy band 'marriage' rocks Manila in nostalgic concert

Lights dimmed for the third time and the crowd was not excited for another front act. Around 10,000 fans, some of them having lined up as early as 4 p.m. under unstable weather for the supposed-to-be 8 p.m. concert on Sunday, June 3, were anxious for the show they paid thousands of pesos for.

 

But when nine images flashed on-screen and nine shadows emerged at 9 p.m., the audience erupted with deafening cheer.  

The 80's and 90's collided at SM MOA's The Arena earlier this week as iconic boy bands from those two generations brought nostalgia onstage with old but familiar beats.  

Publicly born on November 2010 at the American Music Awards, the team-up of 25-year-old New Kids on the Block (NKOTB) and 19-year-old Backstreet Boys (BSB) dubbed NKOTBSB ended their year-and-a-half long international tour in the Philippines, the latest of international acts to enter the country.

 

NKOTBSB started the night with a medley of "Single" and "The One" mixed with iconic strings from Coldplay's “Viva La Vida” before splitting back to their respective groups to sing "Summertime Remix" and "The Call." Throughout the performance, the older Kids were more daring in showing some skin as compared to the younger Boys, but whoever got the louder screams from the crowd was pretty hard to tell.

 

Both groups took turns in performing a total of 29 songs (plus three more hits at encore). The five-member NKOTB pumped the crowd with "Step by Step" and "You Got It" as they thrust their "right stuff" for the cameras, making the already-swooning older audience scream some more. BSB, who's missing a member for the tour, looked like they've been working out less compared to the Kids. But they still caught the crowd with "Get Down," the song that propelled them to fame, and followed up with slow songs like "Shape of my Heart" and "As Long As You Love Me."

 

After singing "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)," BSB's Brian Litrell did a brief rendition of NKOTB's "Please Don't Go Girl" before calling them back on stage.

 

"For us, it feels like 1989 all over again. For some of you, it feels like 1999," NKOTB member Joey McIntyre told the Philippine crowd, as he did in their previous destinations.

 

NKOTB added that "(with this) marriage of two boy bands, in 15 years our boy band babies will come to Manila," and that BSB were "great partners but better friends."

 

Online, Filipino fans took their NKOTBSB fandom with videos and photos to Twitter. Members of the bands also thanked their fans online. –KG, GMA News