I am a bit late in getting to the requisite blog entries. Partly that is because my Dell laptop is sucking now. After only having the thing for two years, the power connector has broken internally such that batteries can no longer be charged; this appears to have happened to many many other Dell laptop owners. Great work, guys. So I take back any good things I said about Dell, especailly after half the desktops at work showed up with bad RAM.
Anyway, the Shinedown/Trapt show at Ram’s Head was great. Trapt led off, lead singer Chris Brown causing the womenfolk to swoon at his sensitive yet profanity-laden lyrics, punctuated with his ever-unnecessarily-flexed biceps. Brent Smith of Shinedown won the most acrobatic award, doing a nice half gainer off of the balcony early in the set, along with a jump from the top of the ridiculously high drum riser that left the audience wondering if he sprained an ankle. Of course both bands pulled out all of the hits, Shinedown with SAVE ME and I DARE YOU, and Trapt with HEADSTRONG, STILL FRAME. Shinedown performed a cover of Skynyrd’s SIMPLE MAN with the help of the audience, then raged against the record industry and gave us advice on making it through our teenage years. In fact, teen angst seemed to be the big social message here and we got an earful from both bands about all of the people “putting us down” and how we could turn that into “positive energy” and whatever else the fuck. Back in my day, this would never have flown, but the mostly college-aged crowd didn’t seem to mind so much. Anyway the main thing is the music and both bands pulled it off, never eliciting my usual reaction to radio bands which is “wow they really suck live!” In fact Smith, though nearly hoarse at the end, was still hitting all of the high notes in the double encore. Both guitarists were energetic, and while there was nothing particularly exciting in the solos, they carried off everything effortlessly. Shinedown’s bass player had a nice solo groove in there at one point.
In all, definitely going to be a highlight of this concert season. Looking forward, we’ve got Al Di at the Birchmere coming up again, Chili Cookoff (maybe)… and uh that’s all I have so far.