Free Concert Friday

So, because I have devel­oped a few con­nec­tions through my work and have start­ed writ­ing music reviews for Urban Dialect, I have now had guestlist access to two shows that I would oth­er­wise had to pay for. Last night I waltzed in to the Grog Shop to see Wait­ing For Evan­ge­line, Mur­der By Death! and Rasputi­na. The evening cost me $6.25: I bought a Wood­chick and left a tip and paid metered park­ing. Not a bad deal for three and a half hours of music.

Wait­ing for Evan­ge­line is based out of Akron. They were bet­ter than Yel­low­card but I kin­da got the feel­ing that they had­n’t set­tled down on their own par­tic­u­lar style yet. They had some real­ly nice riffs but every time the lead singer screamed I want­ed to laugh. It needs some work. They were all busi­ness though and the crowd seemed to like them well enough. I grabbed the band’s stick­er after­ward to add to my gui­tar case. No gui­tar case is com­plete unless it is cov­ered with ran­dom band stick­ers.

Mur­der By Death! was the band my cowork­er is good friends with. They all went to col­lege togeth­er and she was at their first show ever and first road show. They had a cel­list and key­boards in addi­tion to the gui­tar, bass, drumk­it com­bo. They were pret­ty good and they impressed the crowd. A cou­ple of times the sound mal­func­tioned slight­ly but it did­n’t slow them down at all.

Rasputi­na was real­ly good. I have come to the con­clu­sion from watch­ing the cel­list in MbD and the ladies of Raspy that the cel­los is a mighty sexy instru­ment when played by a girl. It is also capa­ble of being more met­al than I’d thought cel­los could be. Melo­ra intro­duced their songs with quirky lit­tle anec­dotes and then they would play and cre­ate wicked cool sound­scapes. They also cov­ered Led Zep­pelin’s Rock and Roll, an amaz­ing ver­sion of Heart’s Bar­racu­da and CCR’s Bad Moon Ris­ing. They also made every­one sit down so that every­one would be able to see them per­form.