Stateside Live Opens it Doors

w/ Bayside. Mayday Parade, Taking Back Sunday

You didn't need to know what the venue used to be called to feel the weight of the night. The room was packed before the first act even took the stage, and then the Philly mascots came wading through the crowd—all of them, working their way toward the stage—and at that point the whole thing stopped feeling like a concert and started feeling like an event. The right kind of event. The city claiming something back.

Bayside went on first and they did exactly what a first band should do: made the room forget it was waiting for anything else. The New York band is heading into a run of dates with Taking Back Sunday, and you could feel the energy of that—a band in motion, loose and confident, reminding everyone in the room why pop-punk still has a pulse. They hyped the crowd and the crowd gave it back. Good start.

Mayday Parade went on second and proved, again, what they always prove. There is something almost unfair about how consistent this band is. Derrick Sanders kept every note in the pocket the way he always does, and the band around him—the same people who have been in this band since 2005—moved like a single thing. You don't get that kind of chemistry from rehearsing it. You get it from two decades of choosing to stay. Every song landed. Not one of them didn't. That's the Mayday Parade thing—you come expecting polish and you get it, but you also get the feeling underneath the polish, which is the harder part to fake. They never fake it.

Taking Back Sunday headlined and they earned it. The first note hit and the room started singing, and the room didn't stop. That's the only way to describe it—there wasn't a moment where the crowd stepped back and watched. They were in it from the first second to the last, singing every word of every song, the kind of mass participation that doesn't happen by accident. It happens when a band has been writing songs that matter to people for long enough that the songs don't belong to the band anymore. They belong to the room. TBS are one of those bands that time keeps trying to pass and can't quite manage it. Tonight was proof. Stateside Live opened on the right note.

Photography by Trey Madara