Images: We Came as Romans, Silverstein, Chunk! No, Captain Chunk!, The Color Morale, Dangerkids October 7, 2013 at Hard Rock Live

Coming off a stint on the Van’s Warped Tour, Detroit rockers We Came As Romans set forth on their Tracing Back Roots tour with support by Silverstein, Chunk! No, Captain Chunk!, The Color Morale, and Dangerkids, stopping at the Hard Rock Live on October 7.

If you’re a Linkin Park fan, chances are you’ll like Dangerkids. The 5-piece melds rap, electronica, metalcore, and rock into a sound that I really enjoyed. They seem to have won over some fans in the crowd too, keeping everyone’s attention from set opener “Countdown” to closer “Waking Up.” Dangerkids released their full length Collapse on Rise Records last month and I’m expecting them to blow up any time now.

The Color Morale played a packed Eagle Aerie Hall show here in May, and they have a loyal following in Vegas so it was no surprise that the crowd erupted as they took the stage. They played an energetic set mostly composed of songs from their latest full length Know Hope and frontman Garret Rapp spouted messages of hope and encouragement before finishing with their hit “Learned Behavior.” Hailing from Paris, Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! plays a mixture of pop-punk and metal that I’ll admit to not liking when I first heard them in 2011. But they absolutely won me over with this year’s Pardon My French and I was especially excited to hear their cover of Ke$ha‘s hit, “We R Who We R,” which they followed up with set closers “Haters Gonna Hate” and “In Friends We Trust.”

Silverstein performed a fantastic 12 song set that spanned their discography. Opening with “In Place of Solace” from their latest release This Is How the Wind Shifts, things only got better from there. They played a series of hits, “Massachusetts,” “Vices,” “Sacrifice,” and “The Ides of March” before jumping into brand new song “I Will Illuminate.” They finished with “Smashed Into Pieces,” “My Heroine,” and “Smile in Your Sleep” as the crowd prepared for headliners We Came As Romans.

Taking the stage to quite a bit of manufactured fog, We Came As Romans appropriately kicked off their set with “Tracing Back Roots.” They got the entire crowd jumping up and down with hits “Ghosts,” “Fading Away,” “Mis//Understanding,” “To Move On Is To Grow,” “A War Inside” and “Never Let Me Go.” To break up the set, they played their cover of The Wanted’s “Glad You Came” which was one of my favorites from 2012 so I was excited to hear frontman Kyle Pavone sing it. The Color Morale’s Garret Rapp joined the band on stage for “I Survive” and to finish the main set, the band played an amazing medley of some of my favorite songs from To Plant A Seed and Understanding What We’ve Grown To Be. For their encore, they played my absolute favorite song of theirs, “Hope,” followed up with “To Plant A Seed.” Security had their hands full as both vocalists jumped into the crowd to finish out the song, and I couldn’t have asked for a better night.

-Tylor Thuirer | https://www.flickr.com/photos/thuirermedia/