Album Review :
The Almost Show Review Rocketown 06-01-08

I attended The Almost show this past Sunday night and wrote some thoughts down about it.  I have never done this before but thought it might be good for those wondering if they should check out this tour which includes in support Emery, Envy On The Coast and Army Of Me.

At first I somewhat dismissed Army Of Me because I hadn’t heard of them before but these guys made me interested enough during their set to be my only purchase of their night.  I picked up their album at the end of the night. The lead singer had good vocals with good backup vocals by the guitar player. They are definitely more rocky live then on the cd but still sounded pretty decent. Envy on the Coast was next up and immediately drew comparisons in my mind musically to Circa Survive or The Mars Volta. They have an interesting live show which seems pretty sporadic at times what with their one guitarist Sal switching between guitar, keys and backup or lead vocals. They did a pretty good set overall though the guy who was mixing their sound seemed to be having a hard time with putting it all together and letting us hear the individual parts…I couldn’t distinguish what any of the backup vocalists were singing for most of their show. Now on to Emery – I had only seen them before do an acoustic show so this was quite a treat. I thought at one point that they now had 3 vocalists but I was told that they still have the same main 2 vocalists (Toby and Devin switched between vocal lead and bass playing throughout the night) but the keyboardist also does backup vocals and a good bit of the screaming. Emery had a good amount of crowd involvement, played 2 new songs from an EP that they will be releasing later on this year and a good variety of tunes from their other 3 albums. This was not a super long set but had a good energy and was a good lead in to the final event of the night. The Almost triumphantly entered the stage to Johnny Cash and a huge round of applause from the crowd. They definitely went for the vintage feel this tour with a sign in the background of their name in old school bulbs and not much light production on stage apart from a few white lights here and there being manipulated (I have pictures of this which I will try to get posted). Musically they were as tight as ever (though I haven’t seen them live before). It strikes me that most people were there to see Aaron Gillespie as I’d say a huge majority of the people took pics of him and not of the other band members. As far as the stage presence of the band outside of Aaron, only the drummer really held my attention for any length of time and did a stellar job.  The rest of the band did their parts but didn’t really capture any of my attention with their stage presence.  The Almost did most of the songs off of their Southern Weather album including a crowd pleasing/inclusion version of “amazing because it is“, an encore of “dirty and left out” to end the night off as well as a cover of “yellow” (originally by Coldplay). After all was said and done this tour definitely has a good line up and seemed worth the 16 bucks it cost me to see the show. If I’d had the money, could’ve actually heard Envy On The Coast’s full ensamble and didn’t already have Emery and The Almost’s albums I probably would’ve picked up all 4 tonight and not just one, they were all worth it.