Bands: Norma Jean, Underoath, Beloved, Dead Poetic, and Haste the Day

 

Venue: Trocadero, Philadelphia, PA

 

Date: Thursday, April 8th, 2004

 

Review by: Josh Blackway

 

Philly is the only city that I know of where you can go watch 5 Christian hardcore bands and still come out seeing about 10 fights. Everybody's a tough guy, but thats ok... this was a great show regardless. The Solid State Tour 2004, as it is called, came through Philadelphia on a rainy Thursday night, April 8^th.

 

Haste the Day opened things up. These guys know what's up. They know how to put on a show. Synchronized guitar swinging, synchronized head banging, and great guitar tone from their Marshall stacks (you really don't see a lot of Marshall amps in hardcore music). I loved it. Their singer had a little Zao-"Blood & Fire"-thing going on, but it wasn't a complete rip off. They had great energy to go along with the positive message of Who they stand for: Jesus Christ.

 

Dead Poetic played next. Hmmm... I'm trying to be a little nicer in this review, but I couldn't really get into these guys at all. Some people were into it, but most of the crowd seemed a little bored. Sometimes it can be hard to decipher between the mix of these chugga-chugga-scream bands, one after the other. So if you're on a "Solid State Tour", you should try to set yourself apart somehow from the rest of the bands. Dead Poetic didn't really sound any different than a typical hardcore band. They weren't a bad band, just mediocre, in my opinion.

 

Beloved hit the stage next. Lately, I've been seeing their shirts all over Philly. There's a little buzz going on with them. Here's the deal with Beloved: they have 2 singers, a guitar player who "sings", and a drummer who does the deeper hardcore stuff. They put on a good show. I've been told that they are much better live, than on their CD, so if you like their CD, you'll probably love them live... that would make sense, anyway. I haven't heard their CD yet, but they can rock it live.

 

So 3 decent openers that all did their fair share in building the show up to this moment: Underoath. These guys were unbelievable. It was keyboards gone wild! So wild that I might wanna make up an all new genre of music for these guys and call it something like "80's Pop-Hardcore". I loved every second of their set. They were, by far, the best band of the night. They have lots of new members since the last time I saw these guys, about 2 years ago, but lots of improvement too. Amazing... go see these guys before you die!

 

Norma Jean closed the night. They had a great light show to go along with their powerful set. The kids at the Troc went pretty crazy for Norma Jean, especially when joined on stage with Aaron, of MeWithoutYou fame, for a song. Fists were flying, feet were kicking, sweat was pouring and blood was dripping. Fighting at shows is really flat out stupid. A lot of kids were thrown out before their set was over. But Norma Jean did rock it. 

 

Fun night, great show.