While most people spend Mother’s day with family, I celebrated it by going to Vital Silence’s album release show. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect considering I had only known of the band through hear-say up to that point. But whatever my expectations were, they were definitely met and exceeded.
Since I want to spend most of this article talking about what I loved, let’s get the stuff I didn’t care for out of the way real quick. Ready? I couldn’t understand the words for half the set. Also, the finale song was great but I felt like the ending was a bit to abrupt. That’s it. That is the only legitimate critique I have in my notes, and it’s honestly just nitpicking. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on.
I think what really made this show great was the fact that it was fun. And that’s saying something, because I pretty much went into the show blind. Also accounting for the fact that it was one in the morning, I had to drop of my friend at the airport at four, and I hadn’t had coffee in a week; I wasn’t exactly in the best of moods (I didn’t want to be around people). Luckily, when the band got on stage they came on with energy that did fade or abruptly stop between songs.
In retrospect, I have they had some Red Bull. Looking back at my notes, I have a lot of points about facials and stances. Particularly, “The bass player is having way too much fun and apparently really wants to be a sumo wrestler,” so props to Dan Zeid. The lead singer, Chris, didn’t hold back on commentary between songs. He even roasted himself by saying, “Now if only I stay in the right key”. But the best part by far was their joke punk song. I have never seen a group do a complete 180 from serious rockers to punk in my life. It was utterly fantastic.
Other than their energy, they have a really awesome ‘90s garage band sound that had me thinking of Chvell. What was also great was that I actually felt like I was watching one group instead of four individual musicians and they maintained a nice balance between variety and cohesion in their songs. Meaning, I felt like they had definitely made an effort in their songwriting but managed to maintain a style.
All in all, I think they killed it. If I leave a show and feel that I made the right call pushing back watching the latest episode of Game of Thrones to the next day. You are definitely doing something right.
