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Rock veterans still scorching at Warped Tour
from: buffalonews.com
by Jeff Miers, News Pop Music Critic
DARIEN CENTER - One hundred bands. Ten stages. Unbearable heat. Water much more appealing than beer.
It must be Vans Warped Tour time again.
On Tuesday, a huge crowd - impossible to estimate in number, as the throng spread across a vast space on the Darien Lake grounds and wandered freely among stages, commercial villages, and tents where one might meet many of the bands performing during the festival - braved the mid-90-degree heat and awe-inspiring humidity to witness one of the most smoothly run and consistently successful annual tours currently hitting the boards.
No matter how hard one might have tried, it was not possible to see all of the bands, and on occasion, the most exciting acts were playing opposite each other at either extreme of the Darien Lake grounds. But it was not at all hard to get your money's worth. There was so much going on that it occasionally seemed like too much.
Warped began life as a combination of punk rock festival and extreme sports showdown. It has changed radically over the course of the 12 years it has been around. The extreme sports aspect has been downplayed to the point of clinging to existence. And the punk rock - well, as punk has diversified to accommodate several subgenres, so too has Warped bending its mission statement to fit all and sundry beneath its ideological umbrella.
Put it this way: This year's Warped was headlined by a glam-goth-emo band (AFI), featured a late '70s and '80s-based punk legend making its Warped debut (JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS), and was granted some of its most intense and rewarding moments by a reformed mid-'90s progressive alt-metal band (Helmet). In between, the day was filled mostly by emo and hardcore bands, few of which were noteworthy.
None of this necessarily fits the initial Warped credo, but it certainly made for an interesting day of music.
A few Warped Tour veterans returned for this year's fest, most notably NOFX and Less Than Jake, two relatively old-school punk outfits still commanding a sizable, appreciative audience. Both bands delivered stellar sets this year.
There were some quite pleasant surprises - a few acoustic sets from bands unaccustomed to such; a standout of the day from hip-hop collective Gym Class Heroes; hometown hardcore icons-in-waiting Every Time I Die blasting the craniums of a devout crowd; and Jett's set of timeless snotty rock 'n' roll among them.
But for many among the audience, the day belonged to two bands - AFI and Helmet.
Both bands delivered what was expected of them.
AFI came first, leaning heavily on its newest album, the briskly selling "December Underground," and commanding the largest crowd of the day.
Led by vocalist Davey Havok, who appeared like some ungodly union of a Droog from "A Clockwork Orange" and that dude from Spandau Ballet, the California quartet blended aspects of alternative music into a wholly accessible, if not downright commercial, sound that might best be described as arena-core.
The crowd went suitably nuts, though AFI is better when seen in the dark, so that the band's mildly spooky image might be writ large by the accommodating shadows.
Helmet brought its progressive metal to the visibly exhausted crowd to close the show, and kicked it hard, its blend of twin de-tuned guitars, stop-start rhythms, Black Sabbath-like crunch and an intellectual (gasp!) bent winning over a crowd that I thought would be much larger, considering the band's legendary status. (Eight hours in the heat, perhaps?)
Regardless, the band was amazingly tight, and time has treated its brainy metal well. Helmet dwarfed the majority of its fellow Warped contenders with its muscular musicianship and its individualistic interpretation of heavy metal.
That would be that, except for one small detail: JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS stole the show - yes, even from Helmet and AFI.
How? By playing genuine songs, with memorable melodies, big, fat hooks, and the I-IV-V chord progressions associated with punk's first wave.
Jett, a rebel since her days with the '70s teen-punk outfit the RUNAWAYS, has changed little. Her voice is still New York City tough, soulful and gritty by turns; her rhythm guitar playing is akin to the simple but gloriously effective work of the late Johnny Ramone; her band plays rock 'n' roll with a sneer, plain and true; and her songs - be they classics like her cover of "Crimson and Clover," "Bad Reputation" or "I Love Rock 'n' Roll," or tunes pulled from her recently released "SINNER" album - are punk anthems.
Right on, Joan. Even the teens in the crowd went crazy.
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