Rock on the Range 2014
Day 1: Friday, May 16 2014
Columbus Crew Stadium – Columbus, OH
Another year, another great Rock on the Range. Last week, a group of us headed to Columbus, OH for our sixth consecutive Rock on the Range – North America’s biggest rock festival, and an epic three day event featuring 3 stages, over 30,000 fans a day, and some of the most incredible performances I can remember. The thing that makes ROTR great is it’s variety – there’s hard rock, old school metal, metalcore, and everything in between, and it’s all on stage at the most well-planned, well-executed, and affordable festival in North America.
This is the first of a series of posts that I’ll write about the weekend – because of the number of bands, the nature of the three day festival, and the amount of awesome that they cram into one weekend, one post simply won’t cut it. This one in particular will focus on Friday and the bands that kicked off the weekend strong. Keep in mind that I can only write about the bands I chose to see at the festival – set times do overlap, so there are bands that I missed, but I like to think I make pretty good decisions on which way to head. 🙂
My goal for these posts is to convince everyone that reads it that if you are not going to Rock on the Range, you are simply crazy! Enjoy!
Devour the Day
Two of my favorite bands kicked this big bastard off….first Devour the Day and then Kyng (see below). For starters..former Egypt Central members started Devour the Day, and I LOVED their debut album. Unfortunately we were waiting in line for a good portion of this show, and only caught it from a distance. They did sound great – songs like Good Man and Respect were just as exciting as I’d hoped, and the breakdown of Respect allowed the crowd to do what they traveled so far and waited so long to do – lose their freaking heads. This was a solid overall show. Provided this group can stay together and consistent, they have a huge ceiling. (I said the same about Egypt Central…)
Kyng
This is the third Kyng show I’ve caught (warning: major bias on my part), but it was really great, and the strongest I’ve seen them yet. This was partially due to new material (off of the new Burn the Serum release), but primarily because of how far they’ve come in terms of stage presence. The first time at ROTR on the Jager stage, they had trouble engaging the hundreds of people watching, turning the show into a stand and watch concert rather than an experience. This time, they played on the much bigger second stage, and – they easily had thousands. Highlights of this show were Pushing and Pulling, and their new single, Burn the Serum, which even had my hard rock friends really impressed. Great set by them and an these two bands back to back really set the bar high right off the bat for ROTR 2014.
Black Stone Cherry
It seems every year there’s an early set that just blows me away. A few years back, it was Sevendust crushing Face to Face at 11:45 am. Last year, Skillet floored me with violinists on pillars on the main stage mid day. This year, I didn’t have to wait long for a stand-out, transcendent show from a not-so-well-known rock band. Black Stone Cherry brought their post-grunge southern rock to ROTR 2014, and they brought it in a BIG way. A countless string of heavy hitting, powerful rock songs (e.g. Blind Man and Lonely Train) made this show really fly off the chart. In addition to big rock tracks and with great, singable choruses, they used their unique southerrn friendliness to take the crowd on an entertaining ride. The big riffs and spot on harmonies had my group banging our heads and singing at the top of our lungs, and I really had to consciously force myself to pay attention to technical parts because I was having so much fun. No concern technically either, though – Musically the show was practically flawless as far as I could tell. The instrumentation sounded great, and the vocals for the show were really spectacular. I commented to a friend several times that the harmonies in this show were so spot on they gave me chills. (Maybe Someday’s harmonies damn near blew me away). The show was so good, it overcame a stigma that I had going in towards the cheesy lyrics in their recent albums. Songs like “White Trash Millionaire”, and “Blame it on the Boom Boom” are not exactly works of poetry…but while they rubbed me the wrong way on the album, they flowed perfectly during the live set and didn’t bother me at all. I wasn’t mad that I couldn’t take those songs seriously – because BSC didn’t take them seriously either. Rather than be annoyed, I wanted to sip bourbon in Kentucky with these dudes, shooting the breeze and laughing as they wrote big, booming riffs and killer harmonies to goofy lyrics like “Me and Mary Jane, got a thing going on!” Overall, this was one of the best shows of the weekend; a monster accomplishment for a pseudo-hard rock band playing at noon at the biggest festival in North America. Kudos – I’ve been listening to Black Stone Cherry non-stop since we left Columbus.
Killswitch Engage
Oh Killswitch. How I love thee. Once again, I was disappointed at how early their set was, and once again, KSE really killed the show anyway. They played old favorites, songs off of Disarm the Descent, and their typical tribute to Ronnie James Dio, and overall, you’d be hard pressed to find a band that puts out a more polished, consistently entertaining metal show. It was a stellar performance that deserves more praise than I am giving it – but I have simply come to expect this from KSE. They never take a show off, never mail it in, and Adam D is one of the most entertaining musicians in the world. One interesting note – I have written previously on Howard vs Jesse vocals, and after seeing Jesse sing the first time last year took the opinion going into this show that Jesse was inferior, particularly on clean vocals. He showed MARKED improvement in this show, with more power on the higher clean vocals, and even MORE growl on the screams. I’m a huge Howard fan, and still give him the slight edge on bellowing difficult clean vocal parts (see: The Arms of Sorrow), but damned if Jesse didn’t sound really, really great on this show.
Lacuna Coil
This is the third consecutive time that I’ve seen Lacuna Coil live, and all three times I’ve left disappointed. I know that this is a wildly unpopular opinion, and Comalies is one of my favorite albums, but I just cannot get into their show. I’m of the opinion that Andrea Ferro (the male lead vocal) simply cannot keep up with Christina Scabbia in the live setting, and the whole show suffers because of it. I did like the new track off of Broken Crown Halo that they played, but unfortunately Lacuna Coil hasn’t yet done what it takes to win me over as a fan. I’m curious what a headlining show at an indoor venue would sound like for Lacuna Coil – I’ve heard great things for sure. At both festivals I’ve seen them play at, it has been a swing and miss for me.
Seether
S
eether put on another great show – another in a long line of consistently good shows that I’ve seen them play. It wasn’t a show that particularly stands out in my head, but I certainly don’t have anything bad to say about it. I’ll also admit that we took a bit of a break during this set, and stood towards the back, but even so, listening to them play Country Song and Remedy was a lot of fun. I will say that Shawn Morgan did not look great – not sure if it was travel or drugs or what – but he had gained a LOT of weight since I’ve seen him last, and looked a bit rough. Hope everything’s ok there.
Staind
Staind had a MAJOR stigma to overcome for me, as last time I saw them, Aaron Lewis was about as unbearable of a front man as I have ever seen. He complained about playing popular songs, he looked totally disinterested, and as soon as the set was over, he just walked off the stage – it was a complete disappointment and I’ve never seen a band mail it in that bad. However, I thought this set was much, much better. I loved the songs off their new album (Eyes Wide Open, Falling, Paper Wings), and they got some help from mother nature as the rain during It’s Been a While was a really cool effect. Lewis didn’t seem nearly as annoyed, and seemed fairly engaged and passionate, especially about material off of their newest album. B+ show from Staind – nothing spectacular, but very enjoyable, and certainly better than their previous disaster, which got an F- from me.
Guns and Roses
The Guns and Roses show was great. It had all the pieces of a great rock band – tons of on-stage experience, money for production value, and three decades of songs to choose from. The show was reaaaaly long (they had to play 30 songs), and there were highlights of the show that were great, but compared to the other big production shows, this one just didn’t do that much for me. I’m really glad I got to see Axl and the gang, and it was certainly a BIG show, but I ended up heading to the parking lot before the end of the show after a long day. Call me a young buck, but this just wasn’t my cup of tea.
So that’s it – a great day of shows to kick off ROTR 2014. After a quick trip to Apollos, which is a little late night gyro place just off the Ohio State campus, we hit the hotel room to sleep, recharge, and get ready for Day 2!
(Edit: For more great content on Rock on the Range 2014, check out my posts on Day 2 (Saturday) or on Day 3 (Sunday). Thanks for reading!)
