Images: Bayside, Four Year Strong, Daylight, Mixtapes March 19, 2014 at Hard Rock Live

Bayside has played here about once a year since forming in the early 2000s. From their early shows at Family Music and Jillian’s to headlining the Warped Tour and most recently in opening slots for Alkaline Trio and Taking Back Sunday, the New York-based punk band is one of the few who never gave up playing in Vegas. And it’s paid off, with the latest show, March 19th’s date of “The Great American Cult Tour” at Hard Rock Live selling out by the time the foursome took the stage. This tour also boasted one of the best lineups of the year so far, with Four Year Strong, Daylight and Mixtapes.

Kicking off the show was Cincinnati’s Mixtapes and to be honest, as much as I love Bayside, Mixtapes was the band that really sold me on coming out to the show. I love their brand of pop punk, which mixes the Lookout! Records style (think Mr. T Experience) with Superchuck-esq indie punk. They’re just so catchy and always a blast to watch. This time around, co-frontman Ryan Rockwell knocked out his guitar during the first song – “Nothing Can Stop the Grimace” – after trying to sing into a mic stand turned completely upside down. After getting things working again, he took a moment to demonstrate the classic “foot on the monitor, duck face” guitar solo pose. The band flew through a mix of new songs like “Elevator Days” and “Ross (Dirty Water)” from their latest Ordinary Silence, classics like “Hope Springs Eternal” and even indulged fan Brandon Borst with a few seconds of music from Rockwell’s former group The Gooningtons. Rockwell asked the crowd what band they should cover and after dismissing our suggestion of Direct Hit! as “losers” and calling one crowd member a dad for shouting “Credence,” the band debuted a cover of the Violent Femme’s classic “Blister in the Sun,” pulling it off quite well for a first attempt. The whole band had huge grins on their faces the whole time and co-frontman Maura Weaver’s voice sounded better than ever on tracks like “Mt. Hope.” This is only the band’s second time in Vegas (first if you don’t count Henderson) and they put on such a good show I’m considering braving the summer heat once again to see them on Warped Tour this summer.

The jovial atmosphere created by Mixtapes’ peppy set flipped 180 degrees when Doylestown, PA’s Daylight took to the stage. The band is amongst a new wave of punk bands influenced more by Nirvana than Blink or Green Day, and while they sound great live they don’t ignite that same kind of kinetic energy that the rest of the pop-influenced bands did, and their short set had the least amount of crowd interaction. They opened with “Sponge,” the first track from their Run for Cover Record’s LP Jar and their set stuck pretty closely to tracks from that record. They played great, but I don’t think they’re quite the right fit for this tour.

The Hard Rock was completely packed when it was time for Worcester, MA pop punkers Four Year Strong. I’ll be honest and say I never listened to much Four Year Strong before this show but I was quickly won over by the band’s infectious energy. I feel like their association with Pete Wentz’s Decaydance Records – home of bands like Panic at the Disco and Cobra Starship – kept a lot of older people like me from giving them a fair shot, but the band’s mix of hardcore and pop punk – sort of like a gruffer, multi-vocaled New Found Glory – is just too much fun. I loved seeing the crowd go off from the moment they started with “What the Hell is a Gigawatt?” and like I’ve said before, any band that references “Back to the Future” gets automatic cool points with me. Outside of festivals like Warped Tour, I’ve never in my life seen as much crowd surfing as I did during their set, with the floor looking more like the ending of Pixar’s “Boundin’” than a concert. The circle pit kept in perpetual motion with only brief stops to sing along with tracks like “Tonight We Feel Alive (On a Saturday)” and “Heroes Get Remembered, Legends Never Die.” As a FYS newbie, the song that I enjoyed most was “Find My Way Back,” whose multi-part vocals and guitar shredding actually reminded me a lot of one of my all-time favorites A Wilhelm Scream. From the way the crowd reacted, it’s obvious they’re doing fine in the fan department, but they gained at least one more with me that night.

I was curious how the venue was going to look after Four Year Strong’s set, as it seemed the penultimate band had a following the headliners couldn’t match. I was proven wrong, as the crowd size actually increased, with the band’s “Cult” of fans flocking to the front for a chance to sing along with frontman Anthony Raneri and company. If you’ve somehow slept on Bayside, their sound is very Smoking Popes influenced, just minus the religious undertones and with the rock turned up a few more degrees. The band kicked things off with Cult opener “Big Cheese,” a raucous number that despite being just a day shy of one month old at the time, still resulted in every word being shouted back at Raneri by the giddy crowd. Kids again started crowd surfing, most hoping to get just a few seconds to sing along with old favorites like”Montauk,” The Walking Wounded” and “Sick, Sick, Sick,” the latter of which had every fist in the room pumping to the titular chorus.

The band is always a lot of fun to watch, particularly bassist Nick Ghanbarian, the one-time Movielife member who spends every Bayside set in a state or perpetual motion, gesticulating wildly across the stage like a man possessed by music. Raneri’s smooth, crooning voice sounded as good as ever, exuding a particularly high amount of turbulence on new tracks, with “Time Has Come,” “Stuttering” and powerhouse first single “Pigsty” among the new tracks. If I had one criticism of their set it’s that too many songs are now mainstays, leaving deeper cuts like “Tortures of the Damned” from self-titled and insanely catchy Shudder single “No One Understands” among the many tracks hardly heard live anymore. But the band did close with two self-titled favorites – “Dear Tragedy” and “Devotion and Desire,” and I appreciated that they still dig out the Alkaline Trio-esq “Masterpiece” from their debut LP Sirens and Condolences, so I can see how it would be hard to cut from the setlist (I can only hope they decide to play even longer sets in the future).

-Emily Matview

Photos by Hunter Wallace | https://www.flickr.com/photos/hunter_wallace/