Concert Review
Scream The Prayer Tour 2009
July 10th, 2009 - Soma - San Diego, CA
Bands (In Order)
Opening Bands:
Corpus Christi
A Plea For Purging
Agraceful
For Today
Feature Bands:
Gwen Stacy
Oh Sleeper
Project 86
Sleeping Giant
The Chariot
Headliner:
Haste The Day
Well this show was cool. Besides all the religious propaganda (more from certain bands than others), it was really solid. Good set of bands here, most I have heard/seen before, but some were foreign to me and will remain to be so. See there's good and bad here just like anything else you run into in music. The opening bands were a joke, an excuse to go across the street and get a beer.
Gwen Stacy pulled a 180 on the show and really kicked things into gear, probably the most underrated band on the tour. They should be playing above alot of these bands on the bill, but because of their abrasive style, lack of over the top religious blabber, and not so flattering image. But still, more of the more enjoyable bands musically. My 3rd time seeing Gwen Stacy (having played with them twice
) they are better and tighter sounding than ever, new song unveiled shows strong promise for the new future. Overall a strong performance from GS.
Oh Sleeper is a band one of my old roommates would constantly rave about, got me into them a bit. Although I've never been a huge fan, they have some good tracks and I do know most of their songs off their old album. This made the show a lot more engaging, the have tons of energy, progressive elements, heavy sound, and not too much off topic blabber. Solid sow from them, new album out soon.
Project 86 is a band I had heard one song from before this show, and will probably stay at that level for quite some time. Lots of attempted crowd interaction (dispite the crowd obviously not receiving them well), religious blabber, and dragging on of the songs to ridiculous interludes smothered in bland spoken word. Was not pleased by this performance.
Sleeping Giant. Here is a band that seems like the want to be preachers more than musicians. They played 3 songs in their set and drug them on sooooooooo long with annoying crowd interaction attempts and RIDICULOUS religious preaching. This band was more of a task to sit through than anything. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone, terrible live performance.
The Chariot is a group of pure entertainers. Flailing about, throwing guitars amongst each other, tossing stage props into the air randomly, crawlling around on the floor and controlling the venues lighting themselves makes for one hell of a show. While the music was an incoherent burp of noise and un un-recognizable to even some of their fans (myself included), the stage antics and pure presence made up for it and made the show quite enjoyable.
Haste The Day, if you can call them that anymore. I have now seen them live 8 times, and they are the primary reason I went to the show tonight. The band had no original members on stage, and looked about as alive as a rotting horse carcass. The two new guitarists couldn't play their way out of a paper bag, but do a fantastic job of looking more like d-bags than Stephen Keech (no easy task), The new bassist is tolerable, but nothing special, and the drummer have no sense of dynamics what-so-ever. That being said, some of the old songs sounded ok, just not the same. When you're used to seeing the old guys up there giving it their all to perform, seeing these hack up there was a huge let down. To top off the horror story, Stephen Keech now has a kid rock hair cut and is attempting to play guitar whilst doing his vocals on certain songs. Not a good idea I might add, not at all. The band, despite their last release being fairly good, seems to be on the fast decline. A band that once inspired me to play, now shames me to even be a fan. Metallica syndrome is in effect, RIP HTD.
Overall, the show was worth 17 bucks. I got a lot of anger out there, I really needed that.