“I don’t like not being able to control my destiny.”
-Unto Others frontman Gabriel Franco
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Portland, Oregon’s Unto Others are no strangers to Boise, having graced stages in this city in November 2021, May 2022 and November 2024. Tonight marked the retro rock band’s fourth performance in the City of Trees and its first time playing at the Shrine Social Club. Unto Others set the table for Castle Rat‘s rousing, hallucinatory, medieval-fantasy performance – while simultaneously erasing all memory of superfluous opening act Wraith Knight, which refers to itself as “dungeon synth,” whatever the hell that is.
One of the many reasons Unto Others were the band that should’ve drawn the biggest crowd in Boise this evening – even with Iron and Wine playing at the Knitting Factory and lovable death-metal goofballs Nekrogoblikon hunkering down at the Shredder – is that Unto Others are a truly one-of-a-kind band in a music climate that seems to subsist on copycats. Unto Others’ sound is a blast from the past; no other band is busting out throwback dark rock with the acumen and authenticity that frontman Gabriel Franco and his pals are producing.
Last year, this writer penned a story about Unto Others for New Noise in which Franco rejected the lazy and inaccurate labeling of Unto Others as a “goth” band. While the article possibly helped deflate the erroneous pigeonholing, it presented just a small fraction of the extensive conversation Franco granted to yours truly. In honor of Unto Others’ fourth performance this evening in Boise, The Bad Penny now brings you the entire – dare we say definitive – conversation that Franco graciously granted to us on November 8, 2024.
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