Sleeping With Giants in Salt Lake City

The Academy Is... headlining tour sweeps through In The Venue

As part of their headlining tour, which is better known as the Sleeping With Giants tour, The Academy Is..., brought friends Armor For Sleep, The Rocket Summer and Sherwood to Salt Lake's In The Venue Wednesday night, Sept. 12.

The tour began Sept. 5 and is scheduled to run until the end of November. Still on their first leg of the tour, most of the bands were partial, so far, to a wild, dancy Utah crowd that showed up despite stiff competition from a slew of other concerts in town that same evening.

The show started off with California five-piece group Sherwood. The group had a little trouble getting going as they experienced some technical difficulties with a microphone. But after realizing how distracting from the song the problem was, the guys quit playing, tackled the technical stuff and took it from the top.

Though they were only opening up the tour and it was still early, the Utah kids in attendance were ready to dance to Sherwood's poppy music and crowd surfed the Sherwood set away. Once Sherwood finished up, the crowd intensified in anticipation for Bryce Avary's The Rocket Summer.

By now most every pop-punk fan knows the name Bryce Avary. Since releasing Do You Feel back in July, The Rocket Summer have taken off with their single "So Much Love." The Rocket Summer have been to In The Venue a couple times previously this year, playing with The Early November and headlining with Daphne Loves Derby.

Despite The Rocket Summer's good track record with putting on energy-rich, fun performances, their new-found fame really turned the crowd that turned out to see them into a mob of crazed teens pushing, punching and kicking their way to be Avary's number one fan.

It really put a damper on the experience of the set. Between that and the fact that Avary and crew put on the exact same show (including the confetti cannon) as last time, almost song for song, this trip The Rocket Summer was a bit of a let down.

The surprising act of the night was definitely Armor For Sleep. Though they were the number two band on the bill for the evening, they drew by far the smallest crowd. But everyone that bailed after The Rocket Summer really missed out as Armor For Sleep put on an amazing set.

Playing from their two current releases, What to Do When You Are Dead and Dream to Make Believe, and playing a couple songs from an upcoming album, the boys from New Jersey brought a good energy onto the stage, though their music was a bit heavier and felt a little out of place with the other bands on the tour.

Even though Armor For Sleep was the surprisers for the evening, headliners The Academy Is... really brought the show together and made the evening worthwhile.

With the relative success of both their debut and sophomore albums, Almost Home and Santi respectively, The Academy Is... has achieved about as popular a status as a band of their nature could without"blowing up," as many of the bands on their label, Fueled By Ramen, have in recent years (Fall Out Boy, Gym Class Heroes and Panic! At The Disco come readily to mind). And they proved it with a non-stop power set that hit on near every song in their two-disc library.

Much of the band's draw, as most critics would say, comes from the honest, melodic delivery of vocalist William Beckett. But the entire band deserves credit for the spectacular performance of their stop at In The Venue. Every song was spot on in every possible way, and the presence of each and every member contributed to the power the performance brought into the venue.

Of course, the crowning performance of the night had to be the first single off of the new album, "We've Got A Big Mess On Our Hands," which the crowd went nuts for. And with good reason, as Beckett and crew fed into the energy and intensity of the crowd and played it up for all it was worth.

Though the Sleeping With Giants tour met with some serious competition as both Muse and Rise Against were in town on that same evening, any fan that picked The Academy Is... over the competition that evening did not leave disappointed. Even if the success of the show rested squarely on the shoulders of the headliners, The Academy Is... brought the skill, energy and stage presence that made the Sleeping With Giants tour anything but a giant sleeper.