I'm attending enough concerts now that it makes sense to start documenting them somewhere, lest I forget. I do have a bad memory.

April 27, 2024

Hell yeah motherfucker, 2 concert nights in a row! I basically attend 2 types of concerts: TWRP, and metal. Mostly metalcore. This time it was Void of Vision and Novelists, followed by Make Them Suffer (best metalcore band right now) and Erra as the headliner. I like Erra, but honestly I mainly wanted to go for Make Them Suffer. They fuckin rocked! I spent the entirety of MTS and Erra's sets in the pit. I usually like to play the role of pit guardian, where I stand on the edge and push people back in while protecting people not in the pit from the people flying out of the pit. Some kid around 125 pounds tops went flying and I managed to catch him while he was mid-fall before he hit the ground. He looked up at me with glee in his face and said "you saved me!" before I patted him on the back and pushed him back into the chaos. That feeling right there is why I like to mosh! Metalcore shows have the best pits. Not much air karate (fuck off hardcore kids), low to no crowd killing, and if someone falls, everyone stops to help them up immediately. Go join the pit if you have a chance, it's a blast! And a great workout, too.

April 26, 2024

TWRP concert #3! Mark came out to visit me in SC for the first time and we took a weekend trip to Atlanta for a couple concerts at the Masquerade. The Masquerade is a kinda cool alley in the Atlanta Underground area that has 4 different venues. TWRP played in Hell. We got VIP again and it was a kickass show. Openers this time were Nelward again (meh) and Trey Magnifique, aka Ninja Brian from Ninja Sex Party. It was another great show and the comedy bits in between songs was the best TWRP has ever been. Proud of the boys, they said this was their biggest headlining tour yet.

May 5th, 2023

Bury Tomorrow and Hollow Front. I wanted to see one more concert with Mark before I moved to South Carolina. This one was at the Granada theater. Hollow Front was good, but their clean singer Dakota had just left the band, and the guy filling in was not great. Still, I was there to mosh, and I was able to do that just fine. Bury Tomorrow fucking killed it, but Granada did not have the best sound. It was kinda muddled. But again, my main goal was moshing which went just fine. I wouldn't mind seeing either band again.

February 22, 2023

TWRP again! We liked the show so much last time that we got VIP tickets this time. TWRP does a VIP pre-show where they have a Q&A and a few songs that general admission doesn't get to hear. They played Daft Punk's "Something About Us" during the VIP set and I about died right there. Daft Punk was huge to me growing up and I was so bummed I never got to see them live. TWRP was always the spiritual successor to me, so hearing them play a Daft Punk song just made the world feel right. Nelward was the opener, not a fan.

October 13, 2022

Bloodywood! My first time moshing. What a blast! A Killer's Confession was the opener. I hadn't heard of them before but I enjoyed it. Later on I ended up adding some of their songs to my playlist and still listen to them now! It's funny, Mark actually introduced me to both TWRP and Bloodywood. That guy has great taste in music! This concert ultimately inspired me to seek out other metal concerts just because I had so much fun in the pit.

March 12, 2022

First concert after COVID! Mark and I had originally planned to see TWRP in April 2020 but...yeah. We saw them in Deep Ellum at Deep Ellum Art Co in Dallas. Kinda small venue but it was cool. Rich Aucoin was the opener. He was fine.

I wasn't super into concerts when I was younger. I saw Ratatat with Nick Cordova back in...somewhere between 2011-2013? Can't remember. When I was young and stupid, I didn't see the point of concerts because I thought that the studio version was superior, why go to a concert to hear a worse version of the music packed shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of strangers? But, that was partially wrong. Music is a form of human expression. It would be boring if live versions of music sounded identical to the studio versions. Plus, some bands (like TWRP) have fun comedy bits in between songs. However, the point about being pakced shoulder to shoulder with strangers (and who are often sweaty and stinky) remains true.