Today is my brief respite from constant paper writing and studying...welcome to my nightmare.
What I inscribe into the hallowed tracts of this blog is a summation of probably the best way to finish off classes for the year!
Wednesday marked my last day of classes, and to mark that celebration all I had to do after my last class was take a little walk down to the other side of campus to the new arena where the hordes of metalheads were held at bay before the ensuing chaos. I found it quite amusing as I walked through campus. The ams blockparty was off in full swing, with some crap band that I've never bothered to pay any attention to, the roots or something like that...meh. The field was frickin packed with students, probably most of em drunk out of their minds (I was driving so I didn't bother). As I walked further on I finally found em: metalshirts, spikes, tattoos, raucious screaming, metal horns....what a night it will be. The really funny thing was that as we all took over the corners and streets along the new thunderbird arena, all the frats were heading down to the block party...loved seeing all the stares as they tried in their drunken entirety to avoid us.
Ended up meeting with Chris and Elaine, seeing that this was their first metal concert experience, it looked like they had quite the first impression. Met up with my bro and proceeded to get in line, running into an old buddy from my last job as well. Once we got in we didn't really bother with the first band who was already playing at the time, Municipal waste. Spent the time instead grabbing some sick merch. God forbid went on next, pretty solid band. I wonder how much "greenery" the vocalist scored, he only asked 5 times when he said they'll be at the merch section in between sets. As they set up for the next set I get a text from my friend Kurt, who called me when he was at the block party when he heard there was a metal show goin on at the same time, kinda funny how i asked him a few months ago if he wanted to go and he said he'll be too busy. Sure enough the text says he's in the arena, perfect freakin timing bud haha, and he was sitting right in front of us a few rows down, so he joins up with us for As I lay Dying. Awesome band, I've listened to them before, not as much but they played a very solid set, gotta listen to em more.
Finally the next band to go on was Children of Bodom, what else can I say? Saw em last year at gigantour, and just like last time they absolutely tore it up, except this time we were a lot closer to the band, and I saw Chris' eyes light up like a kid's at christmas, I could tell she was happy! This was when I started thrashing around, headbangin to the max. Songs like Silent Night Bodom night, Angels Don't Kill, In your Face, Hate Me, Bloodrunk, Hellhounds on my trail. To finish it off, Randy from Log came out to commemorate a special date, that night was Alexi Laiho's bday! This promptly brought about a concerted happy 30th birthday greeting from everyone, don't get any more historic than that! To end it off they went right into Downfall, the same song I almost got whiplash from last year! Awesome show as usual.
Security was pretty crappy though in the set, funniest example was when a fight broke out among two guys who were badmouthing each other, few punches into the head and a tackle, it took like 30 seconds for security to jump in. All of the arena starts to chant and cheer as they're dragged off, just to enhance the comic aspect some random guy walks out past em with pop and popcorn and waves his hands around (cf. Rocky victory pose) resulting in the whole crowd laughing and cheering at him.
Finally Lamb of God started their set, fully took advantage of the stage (had a platform set up around Chris Adler, and a red carpet rolling out in front, dominated by their awesome logo behind the drums, so cool when Mark Morton, John Campbell, and Willie Adler all surrounded the drums). They started playing the acoustic intro from their new album Wrath (Can't stop listening to it, so damn good), and went right into "In your hands". Right away the crowd went nuts, circle pits opening up everywhere, crowd surfing, the whole package. In Randy's ever present opinion we were told once again how Vancouver is the band's favourite canadian city and how we always support them, the reason why they always come back to us first. I always love how the band has such a connection with the fans, especially in one of their fav cities. I was pretty much screaming and headbanging to everything, my neck is still healing from all that. Halfway through the set randy announces to the crowd that Britney Spears (who was playing at GM place at the same time) walked off on her gig 20 minutes into the set due to too much pot smoke, way to go for being the anti-drug activist you freakin hypocrite. So after tearing into her and the general laughing we are reassured that that will never happen at a Lamb of God show. Funny thing was after that, some chick jumps onto the stage and starts dancing around. "look everybody it's Britney Spears' body double courtesy of crystal meth!" before security dragged her off stage. Finally "even though Canada is such an awesome place, you guys can still act like a buncha rednecks!" and then the riff goes into "redneck," crowd went freakin nuts as they used that song to finish off their set and go into "Black Label". Then I saw something that hasn't happened in years, without the band's direction, the crowd separates and form the much dreaded WALL OF DEATH, youtube it if you don't know about it, pretty much picture a lord of the rings fight scene where two sides smash into each other. Left with the humbling image of Randy standing on the stage bowing and kneeling as we chanted "LAMB OF GOD" long past the house lights going up, you can definitely tell that there is a lot of truth towards what he said earlier about how freaking awesome Vancouver is. Definitely one of the best ways to finish off the school year!
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