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Mark my words, that band is going to slide right into Metallica’s role when Metallica calls it a day.
I know people don’t dig ‘em, but man, seeing them go from clubs to arenas over the years and that show last night, they packed the shit out of West Palm. I’ve been going to that venue for over 20 years, Rush, Slipknot, Korn, Alice In Chains, Lamb Of God, Slayer….not a single one of those bands had the same crowd size and fervor A7X got. When the audience starts singing and gets louder than the fucking PA, someone is doing something right.
What blew my mind was when they played “Unholy Confessions”, basically the song that broke them and has been an old school fan favorite since the start- the smallest audience reaction of the night. He announced it and it was like the audience didn’t know what he was talking about. So fucking weird. But all the new prog shit they’re doing? Audience knows all the words, all the time changes and eats it up. I really think the TikTok/IG mentality of seeing these 15/30 second videos has opened up the younger generation to prog music, like having a song with multiple changes throughout it is no longer out of place and can hold the general public’s attention better than it could in previous decades.
I can’t wait to see the breakdown of their rigs, I know they’re all using Fractals now but I don’t know to what capacity. I know there’s a ton of shit on the new album I thought were synths but it’s actually Syn playing the parts.
I’ve seen them probably 5-6x over the years and it’s been really cool to see them progress as a live band. Adding Brooks Wackerman was huge, they’ve always been tight as shit but you can hear a relaxed freedom on the stage now, like that feel of a band that‘s so comfortable and confident in each other that they can just slide into a groove mid-verse and the whole band adapts immediately. They’re surely playing to a click for a lot of their set, but it’s like watching a drummer who can bury the click while dancing all over it, if I didn’t know they had to be playing to a click for some stuff (all their preset changes are MIDI’d up, only some EV-1’s onstage) I’d never know they were.
Falling In Reverse opened. 2nd time I saw them. I’ll give the singer credit for really singing live, but that’s about the only thing that’s live on their stage. I know they had a lot of techs in the industry come out and support them when they had that “We had to cancel our gigs cuz we lost our laptops” incident and everyone said “Those guys are really playing onstage”, I don’t believe it for a second. There’s a few songs where the band leaves the stage for the rap songs, there was zero difference in the sound when the band was onstage or off. Singer was definitely live but if someone held a gun to my head and said “Were the rest of the band live at all during that set?” my final answer would be “No”. That said, they’re going to be fucking huge. They’re very clearly loved by a lot of people and none of my misgivings about them mean shit. You go to enough shows over the years and see bands take off, you can pretty much gauge their trajectory off the audience reaction and that band will have to implode for them not to become huge.
I know people don’t dig ‘em, but man, seeing them go from clubs to arenas over the years and that show last night, they packed the shit out of West Palm. I’ve been going to that venue for over 20 years, Rush, Slipknot, Korn, Alice In Chains, Lamb Of God, Slayer….not a single one of those bands had the same crowd size and fervor A7X got. When the audience starts singing and gets louder than the fucking PA, someone is doing something right.
What blew my mind was when they played “Unholy Confessions”, basically the song that broke them and has been an old school fan favorite since the start- the smallest audience reaction of the night. He announced it and it was like the audience didn’t know what he was talking about. So fucking weird. But all the new prog shit they’re doing? Audience knows all the words, all the time changes and eats it up. I really think the TikTok/IG mentality of seeing these 15/30 second videos has opened up the younger generation to prog music, like having a song with multiple changes throughout it is no longer out of place and can hold the general public’s attention better than it could in previous decades.
I can’t wait to see the breakdown of their rigs, I know they’re all using Fractals now but I don’t know to what capacity. I know there’s a ton of shit on the new album I thought were synths but it’s actually Syn playing the parts.
I’ve seen them probably 5-6x over the years and it’s been really cool to see them progress as a live band. Adding Brooks Wackerman was huge, they’ve always been tight as shit but you can hear a relaxed freedom on the stage now, like that feel of a band that‘s so comfortable and confident in each other that they can just slide into a groove mid-verse and the whole band adapts immediately. They’re surely playing to a click for a lot of their set, but it’s like watching a drummer who can bury the click while dancing all over it, if I didn’t know they had to be playing to a click for some stuff (all their preset changes are MIDI’d up, only some EV-1’s onstage) I’d never know they were.
Falling In Reverse opened. 2nd time I saw them. I’ll give the singer credit for really singing live, but that’s about the only thing that’s live on their stage. I know they had a lot of techs in the industry come out and support them when they had that “We had to cancel our gigs cuz we lost our laptops” incident and everyone said “Those guys are really playing onstage”, I don’t believe it for a second. There’s a few songs where the band leaves the stage for the rap songs, there was zero difference in the sound when the band was onstage or off. Singer was definitely live but if someone held a gun to my head and said “Were the rest of the band live at all during that set?” my final answer would be “No”. That said, they’re going to be fucking huge. They’re very clearly loved by a lot of people and none of my misgivings about them mean shit. You go to enough shows over the years and see bands take off, you can pretty much gauge their trajectory off the audience reaction and that band will have to implode for them not to become huge.
