For all the shit often talked about Warped Tour, I always somehow manage to end up at it at least once, often twice a summer. More often than not, some friends of mine are on it, and there's usually one or two bands that are actually awesome on it, and a couple of guilty pleasure bands that people claim they don't like but secretly love. This year was shaping up to be just like the last, with Saturday's line up in Mountain View, CA boasting A Day To Remeber, August Burns Red, The Devil Wears Prada, Less Than Jake, Attack Attack!, Against Me!, Set Your Goals, The Acacia Strain, Winds of Plague, Moving Mountains, the EVER controversial Dance Gavin Dance, The Wonder Years, I Set My Friends On Fire, Unwritten Law, Lucero, Street Dogs, The Aggrolites, and Simple Plan. Only a handful of those bands are worth watching, and we ended up catching about six of them.
Our day started at what is normally the main stage in the ampitheater, but when Warped Tour comes through town, they split that stage into two smaller stages, this year called the Nintendo 3DS and Tilly's AP stages, respectively. These stages are often crossroads for bands. Usually they are split equally between bands well on their way to stardom (I saw Four Year Strong, Set Your Goals, and Miss Katy Perry herself on these stages in 2008), and bands plummeting to either their timely or untimely demise (Unwritten Law, Dance Gavin Dance, and Relient K were repping for the FAILBOAT this year). As far as these stages go at the Warped Tour stop at Shoreline, they're awesome because THEY'RE IN THE SHADE and if you don't have special wrist bands like we had, you can actually sit down and not be moshed to death by teenagers. Here's who we checked out in that neck of the woods this year.
Unwritten Law
Unwritten Law were part of that wave of skateboarder/surfer-oriented punk bands that blew up in the mid-90s. Their peers were bands like Blink-182, Dancehall Crashers, Fenix Tx, MxPX...you get the idea. If you're wondering why someone rocking a Kvelertak shirt on that specific day was even interested in checking these dudes out, well, nostalgia will make a man do crazy things. To be honest, early on in their career, they were pretty fucking good. They sort of walked the line between Green Day's adolescent innocence and Pennywise's limited aggression. Check out this banger:
That song is called "CPK" and as my boy Sergeant D over at the almighty Stuff You Will Hate blog will attest to, its the SHIT. So naturally, I was hoping for a sweet flashback to my younger days. That isn't too outlandish to expect, right? Welp, I was wrong. What Unwritten Law delivered was a thirty minute set of shotty, outdated songs (only one of which I recognized, "Teenage Suicide"), and frontman (and from what I gathered only original member) Scott Russo pitching rockstar-esque fits over gear malfunctions I've seen high school aged bands recover better from. While what I saw onstage Saturday was not the UL I grew up loving, I can't say that there weren't a (very) small contingent of fans there excited to see them, belting out every word. Apparently they've kept putting out records and all 60 people that bought them showed up to Mountain View that day. Needless to say, it was a sad sight, and an obvious omen that it's time for these dudes to wrap it up. The 90s ended eleven years ago, and Unwritten Law's relevance was arguably out the door even before the millenium ball dropped.
Moving Mountains
I discovered Moving Mountains when I came up on some tickets to see Say Anything in San Francisco. The other bands on that tour were some bullshit I didn't care about, but I decided to look into this random band I was unfamiliar with. I was expecting some sort of pop punk, whiny, fake emo bullshit that seems to be running rampant throughout suburbs across our great country, but I couldn't have been more off. Moving Mountains play throwback 90s indie emo with the complexity of and as captivating as Sunny Day Real Estate or Braid, but put through a shoegazer-ish filter evoking comparisons to My Bloody Valentine, Ride, or Cerberus Shoal. The band's first full length, Pneuma, was chock full of horns and additonal vocalists which made for an outstanding record that flowed seemlessly from one song to the next, but left me wondering how they would address this sound live, because there was no way they were taking that many people on a van tour.
I ended up missing the Say Anything show they were on, but caught them on tour with that shitty Biffy Clyro band that only people in the UK seem to care about. That night at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco, Moving Mountains completely blew me away and when their set ended, it was the first instance in a long time that I wished a band would have kept playing. Seeing them added to this years Warped Tour line up got me fucking siked, and I was ready to watch them turn heads and potentially steer some impressionable teenager away from listening to some shitty band like Black Veil Brides or Of Mice & Men. Moving Mountains did not disappoint. Their swirled through a thirty minute set comprised mostly of songs of their new record Waves (which is a banger and needs to be up in your mix ASAP), and "Cover The Roots Lower The Stems" from Pneuma. The band sounded just as full and dynamic as they do on record, and persevered through guitar straps breaking due to their dramatic yet genuine body movements their music drives them to do. If you appreciate 90s melodic emo, indie rock, or shoegaze, you need to be up on Moving Mountains.
Lucero
To be honest, I was surprised to see Lucero as an addition to the 2011 Warped Tour. I have been a fan of the band for well over seven years and throughout that time, have seen them sell out several respectably sized venues in the Bay Area, and seen them be major draws on Austin, TX's Fun Fun Fun Fest, as well as supporting such heavy hitters as Against Me! and Social Distortion. Their folky, americana tinged punk is definitely not what the young ones seem to be interested in these days (especially judging by some of their fashion choices). To anyone with ears that work, it is rather obvious that Lucero are a band with a much older audience than the average Warped Tour alumni, and knowing that, it was puzzling to see them participate knowing that they probably wouldn't be on a "huge draw" stage there. What's in it for them? Some secrets never leave their circles. Naturally, being on the older spectrum of Warped attendees, I wasn't about to miss them.
The band started out their set with my favorite song, "That Much Further West", but it was cut short due to some sort of bass technical issue. Oddly enough, it was via technical issues that the crowd was able to see how much more of a real band Lucero is versus many of their peers on the Tilly's/AP stage, much less the entire tour. While techs scrambled to fix the issue, frontman Ben Nichols lead their pedal steel and keyboard players in a song that didn't require bass, never losing the attention of the audience. Eventually, the bass issue was resolved, and the band resumed their set as if there hadn't been any issue with the bass rig while the ampitheater seats continued to fill with curious onlookers. One thing noticeably absent from their stage set up was a set list, and at when a fan yelled out "Kiss the Bottle", Nichols said "All right, we haven't done that on this tour. Let's give it a go". Nichols called off the famous, heart-wrenching Jawbreaker song and played arguably better than Jawbreaker did. Their allotted half hour seemed to end all too abruptly, proving that Lucero's real home is headlining a stage in a dark club rife with cheap beer and decent whiskey, not in a sparsely full ampitheater playing to curious onlookers while 3OH!3 is annoying the world from across the parking lot.
After this, we moved over to the Advent Stage, which is stage of bands that could probably hold their own on the main stage, but bring the mosh a little too hard, or are at least a little too aggressive for the average high school student with a stupid haircut. Some of the bands we didn't care to see on this stage were Miss May I, Of Mice & Men, Woe Is Me, Black Veil Brides, The Word Alive, and We Came As Romans. Sitting in the hot sun and baking seems less torturous than enduring any of those bands. However, the Advent Stage wasn't completely devoid of talent or at the very least, entertainment. Here's who we caught.
Winds of Plague
I have to be honest. I would barely consider myself a fan of Winds of Plague. I always saw them as a watered down version of Bleeding Through(right down to the gothy female keyboardist) with corny lyrics and Southern California "bro dude" posturing. Then I saw this video...
IS THAT NOT THE AWESOMEST SHIT YOU HAVE EVER SEEN IN YOUR LIFE? This is probably the greatest Madball song written in years. The mosh parts are just stupid heavy, the lyrics are over the top aggressive, and the video homage to bands like Biohazard and Life of Agony are TOO GOOD not to like. So upon discovering this only days before going to Warped, I was fucking siked. I was ready to mosh hard for the state I call my home...
...BUT THEY DIDN'T EVEN PLAY THE FUCKING SONG! WHAT THE FUCK, BRO? How does a band leave by far its greatest musical accomplishment ever off of the set list on a tour that has them playing to thousands of aggressive youths everyday? I know the song has vocals from Martin Stewart of Terror and the guy from As Blood Runs Black, but cmon, is it that hard for Johnny Plague to handle on his own? NEWSFLASH WINDS OF PLAGUE: SEIZE THE MOMENT AND PLAY THE BEST SONG YOU'VE EVER WRITTEN WHEN YOU'RE PLAYING A BIG DEAL FEST LIKE WARPED TOUR. The kids were into their other stuff, but no other WOP song would have opened the floor up as much as "California" would have. Not the "I don't fear evil, evil fucking fears me" song, nor whatever other Bleeding Through leftover song they polished up and called their own. The only other notable parts of their set were a rather questionable sample of Barack Obama saying "The United States has killed Osama Bin Laden" (don't get me wrong, that was a gigantic moral victory for New York and Bin Laden himself was an asshole, but using that sample to get mosh pits pumping harder strikes an odd chord with me), and the female keyboardist's unusual playing stance that more often than not had her nearly bent over with her hair whipping (I'll let your imagination fill in the blanks on that one). I more or less sat through a half hour of unimaginative mosh metal for one song that wasn't even played. Uber bummed on that.
Set Your Goals
Yeah, I know we reviewed their new record Burning At Both Ends last week and loved it. So knowing that, did you really think we WEREN'T going to watch them wreck shop at Warped? I mean c'mon, this site is run by a dude. Dudes are predictable. Needless to say, when Set Your Goals hit the Advent Stage (and hard, might I add), not only were we there rearing to go, but so were a couple of thousand kids who instantly went ballistic as drummer Mikey Ambrose counted the band in and lead them into Burning's opening jam, "Cure For Apathy". The next half hour saw the Advent Stage turn into a trampoline for the band as they went through "Echoes", "The Fallen", "Summer Jam", and the new single, "Certain". As Set Your Goals got deeper into their set, the crowd seemed to go even more wild, with the stream of kids rolling over the top of the crowd and over the barricade becoming more rapid and the mosh action getting so out of hand that at one point, a fight erupted that from what I gathered, security did not come out on top of. The band closed their all too short set with the anthemic "Mutiny" (a rather ironic choice after watching a security guard get his ass handed to him by the crowd), during which the frenzied crowd energetically surged one final time before the band retired to their merch tent for autographs, photographs, and hugs for fans.
Bands we sort of saw, but didn't see enough to really review, but we will be checking out again at the August stop in Sacramento:
Bad Rabbits
A band who can cover Michael Jackson this well is on some next level shit. We caught them while we were waiting in line for our passes, but that half-focused look was not nearly enough to make a proper judgement on them. However, based entirely on their Stick Up Kids EP and this cover, this band is probably primed to be gigantic.
The Acacia Strain
These dudes are heavy as fuck, did some dates with our good friends in Disembodied a few months back, and also brought our friend Jesse from The Wrath up to do guest vocals. However, I had go to play dance music in Oakland later that night and needed some downtime, so we took off during their set. However, the amount of shit they were talking on Black Veil Brides (who directly followed them on that stage) was enough for me to know that I will be needed to investigate these dudes closer in August.
The Wonder Years
I'm a sucker for good pop punk, and these dudes do it. Don't really have much more of a reason than that.
Thank you to Matt and Set Your Goals for getting us in and being gracious hosts. We will be checking out the Sacramento date August 11th because its obvious that we missed some gems Saturday.
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