Has anyone else been able to go to one of the shows? I saw it last night and it was amazing! I was bummed that The Chariot couldn't make it, but other than that it was great. I'm just going to repost what I posted in the concerts thread and on another board.
Just went and saw the Scream the Prayer tour last night, which was easily the best concert I've ever been to. To start off, my friend Samantha somehow managed to get me a free ticket from the vocalist of one of the local bands that played at the show, Onward Towards Olympus, so that saved me $20 to spend on merch. Overall it was a crazy show, I was there from 2:30ish until almost 10pm.
I missed a band or two because I got to the show last minute, but I still saw a some local bands before the bands I'd heard of started playing. I don't remember any of their names, but most sounded pretty good.
Corpus Chrisi was the first non-local band to play. As with alot of the bands on this tour, I hadn't heard much of their music (if any), but I really liked their performance. Nothing particularly interesting happened during it though. Afterward, I bought their cd "The Darker Shades of White."
Next was A Plea For Purging. Their bassist has an awesome beard, I want one like that lol. These guys also didn't do anything particularly crazy, but they were good. They probably have the worst memory of the night for me because they were the ones that delivered the bad news that The Chariot (who I very much wanted to see) wasn't able to make it due to their trailer breaking down mid-trip. At this point I still didn't know any songs that had been sung all day, but I screamed with parts of them anyways.
APfP was followed by Agraceful. I sort of knew one or two of their songs from listening to their album once a few weeks ago, but still couldn't sing much more than I had with the previous bands. I don't recall anything particularly crazy happening during their performance.
For Today was amazing for several reasons. First off, their vocalist couldn't make it because of a family emergency, so Sleeping Giant and Agraceful's vocalists took turns on the mic. Both confessed to not knowing all the words to the songs and that they would need alot of help from the crowd; this is where the action really picked up. The vocalists spent most of their time standing on the crowd and passing the mic around or holding it out to groups. The crowd had tons of times when they all just rushed forwards from the back, and since I was in front I took alot of the pressure from that. It was crazy, and made an interesting challenge of trying not to let Samantha get squashed. I've never been that close to anyone in my life ever; I couldn't jump because when I did it felt like I was humping Sam's back, and her friend Michael complained that he felt like he was raping a guy at one point. Definitely the most insane part of the show and the beginning of the more spiritual aspect as Sleeping Giant's vocalist encouraged us to stop and pray for Mattie's (For Today's vocalist) emergency. It was great. I ended up buying their new cd, and wanted to get the old cd and a t-shirt, but both of the shirts I wanted were sold-out in my size, as was the old cd.
Gwen Stacy was a good show and had more instances of the vocalist (and also the bassist) standing on top of the crowd. This is also where the night finally started getting into songs I knew better.
Oh, Sleeper was amazing, as expected. I pretty much ruined my voice on "Vices Like Vipers" alone. There was more moshing and crowd surfing in this part of the show, and the vocalist dove into the crowd at one point, which looked awesome but I was very relieved it wasn't on my part of the crowd. I was getting tired of fending off mosh-pit expansions and crowd-surfer feet anyways.
Project 86 really surprised me. They're not metal or screamo by any means, but they fit in remarkably well. Andrew Schwab (vocalist (also the singer/writer I've told you about, Drew)) asked for a circle pit in one song, and afterward basically insulted the crowd for not doing it right. They got it right on the next song, which meant more impacts in my back lol. I think this was also when someone tripped out of the pit, knocked a guy down who hit a guy whose head bashed into my nose. On P86's final song, Andrew actually handed the mic off the someone in the crowd and ran around the stage while letting that person finish off the song. I found that interesting because I've never seen that happen before, normally the vocalists keeps a hold on the mic.
Sleeping Giant did a great job. This was definitely the most spiritual part of the show, and I loved pretty much everything the vocalist said. The music was great, and I knew a few of the songs almost all the way through which made it even more enjoyable. We all sang "Oh Praise Him" for what felt like 10 minutes, which was amazing. And as they were leaving the stage, the area that had held the mosh pit turned into a big prayer circle, which was amazing to see. I've heard too often that my type of music can't be Christian, but when something like that happens at the concert, you can't really deny the Christianity of it (and that's ignoring the immense cheering at almost every mention of a band being Christian or loving God or anything like that). I could've gotten both of their cds for $12 total, but they were both sold out when I made my way to the table, so I ended up only getting a t-shirt. It's black, has a picture of Jesus' head on the front and in the background says "worship worship worship worship mosh".
Then it was time for the final band of the night, Haste the Day. Luckily I had listened to their two newest cds on the way to the show, because otherwise I wouldn't have known anything except the last song they sang lol. At one point, two random guys showed up on stage (no clue who they were) and were playing/screaming, then they both dove into the crowd, one of them happened to dive onto my head. Also, at this point in the show I got separated from my two friends and on the very edge of the mosh pit, so I had to fend off alot more people to keep myself from getting hit. I tried to buy an HtD shirt afterwards, but again my size was sold out.
As I said before, this was easily the best concert I've ever been to on every level. I got in free, got to hang out with a friend I don't see often, made a new friend, had a great time with the most insane/brutal concert I've seen, felt the presence of God more than in pretty much any other concert, and made a few other neat memories (this was Michael's first hardcore show, and he got to go crowd surfing at the end which was cool. Also, I ran into The Separate's old bassist Paul in the middle of a song; he thought he recognized me, but when he introduced me to his friend as "my cousin Alex" I realized something was up. Turns out he probably didn't know who I was at all lol.)