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.

Honda Civic Tour 2007 brings the noise to Salt Lake City

Fall Out Boy and guests pull off magnificent performance at the E Center

The Honda Civic Tour stopped in Utah on the last leg of its 2007 national tour. The Honda Civic Tour has been touring the nation annually since 2001 with such headlining acts as Blink-182, Incubus, Black Eyed Peas and Dashboard Confessional.

This year pop-punk outfit Fall Out Boy took the reigns as the headliners for the tour, which showcased custom Civics and promoted environmental awareness and alternative fuel choice through its hybrid models.

Through the luck of the draw from an online contest, hosted by 1,000 Clever Lines, I was able to get in on the event, enjoy some excellent seats with my wife, thanks again to 1,000 Clever Lines’ giveaway, and catch great performances from Fall Out Boy, +44, The Academy Is…, Paul Wall and Cobra Starship.

The show kicked off around 6 p.m. at the E Center in West Valley City. Cobra Starship, the new band of Midtown’s Gabe Saporta, got things going, playing the better half of their debut album, While the City Sleeps, We Rule the Streets.
With songs like “It’s Amateur Night at the Apollo Creed!” and “The Church of Hot Addiction,” Saporta, who sported some of his killer new dance moves, and crew started the night off right, ending with the anthem from that one movie about snakes on planes, “Bring It (Snakes On a Plane),” joined on stage by Paul Wall and William Beckett (The Academy Is…), who also appeared on the studio version of the song and the video.

Paul Wall switched things up a bit, being the only rap act on the tour. The Houston performer showed off his skills and grills, for which he is most famous, while supporting his new album Get Money – Stay True. Though a talented artist, given the circumstances of the night, most of the crowd was roaming the hallways of the E Center instead of enjoying Wall’s beats and rhymes.
The seats filled again after Wall as Chicago pop-rockers The Academy Is… brought the evening into its prime. Starting of with the single “The Phrase That Pays,” William Beckett and crew kept the crowd excited sampling pretty evenly from their 2005 release, Almost Here, and their new record, Santi.

The highlight of The Academy Is…’ performance was the last three songs, starting out with the ballad “Everything We Had,” which had cell phones and lighters dotting the arena like fireflies in an open field at night, and bringing back the power with “We’ve Got a Big Mess on Our Hands” and “Checkmarks.”

The better part of 2001’s Honda Civic Tour headliners, Blink-182, joined this year’s tour under the new name +44. Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker’s new band, which gets its name from the United Kingdom’s phone code, played an incredible set, though most Blink-182 diehards were left with a lacking feeling from the show.

Hoppus’ antics felt very familiar to a Blink-182 performance with his skipping around the stage and making crass remarks throughout the set, but with songs like “Lycanthrope” and “Baby Come On,” a duet with Victoria Asher (keytarist for Cobra Starship) on “Make You Smile” and the performances by guitarists Shane Gallagher (The Nervous Return) and Craig Fairbaugh (Transplants), +44 is definitely out to separate itself from comparisons.

Even so, +44 fed those who compare the two bands something for thought, playing a version of “The Rock Show” which sounded almost identical to a Blink-182 performance of the song. Hoppus brought back the point that it’s all about him this time ending the set with the single “When Your Heart Stops Beating” and dragging out the ending of the song in classic rock star fashion then, after demanding more applause he, alone on stage, played a little improve bass solo and took a bow.

After the Mark and Travis show, headliners Fall Out Boy literally exploded onto the stage, performing the opening track, “Thriller,” to their new album, Infinity On High. Then, after playing “Grand Theft Autumn” (which Pete Wentz referred to as the national anthem) and being joined on stage by Gabe Saporta, they played a partial cover of Akon’s “Don’t Matter.”

The Chicago-based rockers’ set fairly consistently switched between the new release, 2005’s From Under the Cork Tree and 2003’s Take This to Your Grave. Except when they, “for the sake of the parents” in attendance, covered Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” in fine fashion. The cover was spot on musically and Patrick Stump’s lyrical stylings to the King of Pop’s classic were excellent.

After Stump performed a piano solo version of “Golden” and the full band returned for “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s An Arms Race,” they ran off stage. Then the host of the evening, Dirty, came on stage and set up a batting cage. He took a few pitches from a pitching machine to the chest, and then got the crowd chanting for an encore.
The band returned with “Thnks fr th Mmrs” and played a bait-and-switch for “Dance, Dance” as they moved Andy Hurley and his drums to the front, Stump halfway up the stage ramps and Wentz and Joe Trohman went into two glass compartments on either side of the door. A few moments later Trohman and Wentz reappeared on the top of a custom Honda Civic at on the other side of the arena and Dirty popped out of the center of the stage where the band first appeared, dancing.

Following “Dance, Dance” Hurley performed an intense drum solo, giving Trohman and Wentz enough time to get back to the stage, and the band ended the evening by inviting everyone down onto the floor for confetti and “Saturday.”

Full of fireworks, streamers, confetti and other pyrotechnics, Fall Out Boy put on a very entertaining show, as did the other guests with their stage presence. The Honda Civic Tour rolled out of Utah for 2007, having had a successful evening on the final leg of this year’s trip.