Maji's blog: "Musik"

Been three yrs since the last festival was washed off by a hurricane, was great see things get back up and running.

Day of debauchery as expected. All the bands were good, some better than expected. 

First time hearing Art of Dying, was impressed enough to seek out some listening after the fact.

Was cool to here all the ole GNR tunes with the mainstay member Slash, minus fuknut Axel, plus better singer/cooler guy Miles Kennedy.

FFDP was tight. Pretty cool stage set with truck grills all welded together in front of the amps. They stopped in the middle of the show, and dude said "Im having a hard time continuing while seeing these little faces squished between all you grown up fukers...lets fix that right now." So he had the roadies pull all the kids out and bring em onstage. Pretty cool.

Sidebar to that...I watched the guitar player pick out these two chics from the crowd and motion for them to come around side, and the roadies helped them up and led off to backstage. So of course, everyone over this section of the crowd starts chanting "Two chicks, at the same time! Two chicks, at the same time!". But..... after the show, coming in the VIP area I saw them again, but they were with different members of the band, one being the singer. I didnt wanna be a douce and bother him with a photo op as they were obviously trying to chill and blend in. So I just fistbumped him and told him the show was precision, to which he quipped right on brutha, and mentioned i had a fly ass goatee lol. 

I didnt realize the irony of fistbumping the singer for Five Finger Death Punch until I was on my way home lol.

Shinedown sounded great, and had forgetten just how many radio hits they have, recognized more than I thought I would. But....they simply used too much backtracking and harmonizers. There was way too much going on soundwise for the instruments they had onstage, and at times I was hearing upwards of 6 voices with only 2, sometimes 3 actually singing. That stuff is okay in moderation to provide a nice backdrop "wall of sound", but they just got carried away with it as the night went on and it started sounding kinda synthetic.

Every show has that one lingering song that hangs with ya afterwards, that you remember best for whatever reason, being how well it was done, or amount of crowd participation, or both. 

So I have to say that tip of the hat goes to this chic from Halestorm, and this tune below. Maybe because it was a ballad and you could hear the crowd better, I dunno, but it sounded like a chorus of all 30 thousand doing their part. To me was like she actually held back on the studio version, or she had to kick it up to get up over the crowd, whatever the case, she took that shit to the top of the fukin hill and brought it hard. =)