audiopinions

Onward To Snowdown has passed and we have finally recovered from the epicness of it. February 25th saw The Abominable Snowtour come to The Brewery in Raleigh, North Carolina. War of Ages, Living Sacrifice, Lionheart, The Great Commission, and the local openers Embracing Goodbye all played that night as myself and a friend made the trip from ECU. This time around, we left on time and were the fourth and fifth people let into the venue when the doors opened. At around 6:30 PM ET, Embracing Goodbye started to play. There were not a lot of people at the show yet and they were the opener, so their show was not up to what they could do in other circumstances.

Next up was The Great Commission who had two banners for their show. Since a lot of their music is based around breakdowns and the like, there were quite a few dancers but other than that, there wasn’t much of a crowd interest. Their show was still pretty good, and the band members were awesome. I do want to say that for such a short set, they could be seen as being a bit too preachy.

Lionheart was the next band on stage and no one was really into them. There were dancers as usual but most of the crowd thought that they were too “tough-guy” hardcore and could not get into their music. Also, their bassist become annoying very fast. In my eyes, they were the worst performance of the night and they have lost me as a potential fan. Then came the two bands everyone was there to see.

Living Sacrifice is a set I will not soon forget. They had a light show, everyone in The Brewery was into them, and it was an old school metal show with everyone headbanging. They played a good mixture of old and new songs and the band is full of amazing guys. I would hope that everyone that had never heard of them before came out of that set at least interested in them. This was my favorite performance of the night, but it had a close rival with War of Ages.

War of Ages were headliners for tonight, and again, everyone was there for them and even though there were dancers, they knew the lyrics to the songs and joined in whenever they got a chance to. The band played mostly new songs and ended their set with “All Consuming Fire” before doing an encore of “Brothers In Arms.” All in all, it was a little shaky at the beginning but ended up amazing at the end. This tour was very diverse, and it was great to see each band get along with each other so well.