October 20th, 2015

Years ago, and I mean years ago, I was a huge Korn fan. Call it teen angst(which it likely was), but the music spoke to me in a way my fragile little mind had yet to understand. Anyway, as phases tend to do, my love for the band passed.

As you can imagine, years passed, and low and behold a good friend gets free tickets to the show, so a few of us decide to see how poorly this band has declined since their heyday. First off though, opening bands must be mentioned. Starting the show was a band called Islander. Now, I hadn’t ever even heard of them before I found out about the show, but the name stuck out at me for some reason. While middle of the road musically, the name appeared to me to be more in line with a dreamy indie band, ala Real Estate or something, Anyway, they weren’t terrible by any means, but the consensus seemed to be that they were nothing special.

Second up was Suicide Silence, and pretty much I was expecting it to be terrible and generic. I just assumed it was going to be garbage, but honestly, I really liked it. They bring tons and tons of energy to the stage, and the drummer is absolutely amazing. Between he and the singer bouncing all over the stage, they brought enough power to the set to not even need the guitar and bass players to do much, except even they went ape shit with the hair swinging and rocking out that everyone loves to see in a metal band. For forty minutes they killed the crowd, and it was a well played set that people really seemed to enjoy.

After that, the headliners were up. The latest band to do the “play a full album every night”tour, I came into this remembering how poorly they performed when I saw them on the “Untouchables” tour from over a decade ago, so I was less than excited to see what they had to offer. Alas though, they did actually deliver. Opening the show with perennial favorite “Blind,” they killed the first album in it’s entirety, and although they zoomed through it( the entire album plus the five song encore took less than 80 minutes) they crowd thoroughly enjoyed it. Especially the clearly 30something dude with half his hair missing and a kilt on. For real though bro, become an adult.

Having said that, the album, and the band as a whole sounded really good, especially compared to reviews I’ve read in the last few years. Jonathan Davis sounded better than he has in at least 4 albums, and the whole band seemed reinvigorated and truly like they were having fun. After the Self titled album was over, the band retreated to the backstage area to prepare for the encore. Now I hate forced,prearranged encores, mostly because it kills time you could have spent playing, but upon the return they rocked out some of their other big hits from various albums. “Falling Away from Me” rocked just as hard as it did on “Issues,” and “Coming Undone”  was still a fan favorite. The closer though, “Freak on a Leash,” got everybody rocking out and with that high note the band sent everyone on their way after a fun, albeit somewhat brief show. Thaks for reading, see you Thursday!