As the weather changes, and temperatures & leaves fall, the winter concert season begins. Within the confines of The Rapids Theatre, one wouldn’t have known it was a chilly fall night, as Five Finger Death Punch delivered a face-melting performance.
Taking the stage to the crowd’s chant of “FIVEFINGER!”…. “DEATH PUNCH!”, Lead singer Ivan Moody fed off of their energy, opening with “Under And Over It”. When a few crowd surfers making their way over the barricade, he made sure to shake their hands, as soon as they were safely on their feet. Typically, there’s a lot of surfing at 5FDP shows, but for some reason, that was not the case at this show. It may have been partially due to the fact that one young lady required attention when she passed out a few feet from the barricade. Moody stopped the show, and made sure she was taken care of. Before getting started again, he made sure to let everyone know that if the behavior in the mosh pit didn’t improve, and fans didn’t respect the security, he’d drop his mic and walk off the stage. Stating that “We’re all here to have a good time, and sometimes somebody gets the shit knocked out of them, but when one of us goes down, we pick each other the fuck up’!
At one point during the show, Moody brought a lucky young man named CJ, up to sing “Burn MF” with him. Moody assured CJ that he would not get in trouble, because his parents would understand he was helping him with the song. At first he was a bit timid, but as the song progressed, so did CJ’s confidence. By the end of the song, he was as loud as Moody, and looked as if he was ready to take his place.
With their command of the crowd, 5FDP rolled through their set with hit, after hit, as the fans sang along with every song. As lead guitarist Jason Hook traversed the stage, dazzling the crowd with his amazing fret work, rhythm guitarist Zoltan Bathory held things together with bassist Chris Kael, and drummer Jeremy Spencer.
As they approached the end of their set, Moody spoke about their last album with which he got to work with a lot of guest performers, with some of them making him feel like the guest. One of his favorite songs on that album was done with Tech N9ne, an LL Cool J cover of “Mama Said Knock You Out”, which they closed their set with.
Returning to another “FIVE FINGER”…. “DEATH PUNCH” chant, they performed a two song encore, including a crowd lead a cappella version of “Far From Home”. As they finished with “The Bleeding”, the entire band came to the front of the stage, took a bow, shook hands, and handed out picks and sticks to everyone in the front rows.
5FDP is one of those bands that gets a lot of crap from “real” metal fans for being soft and whiny. The fact of the matter is; these guys are humble, down to earth musicians, who are fully capable of melting your face off. I guess jealousy is the natural knee-jerk reaction when someone is able to pull off both.
Setlist:
Under And Over It
Burn It Down
The Way Of The Fist
Hard To See
Lift Me Up
Bad Company (Bad Company cover)
Burn MF
No One Gets Left Behind
Remember Everything (acoustic with Jason Hook)
Battle Born
Never Enough
Coming Down
Mama Said Knock You Out (LL Cool J cover)
Encore:
Far From Home (a cappella)
The Bleeding
We would like to thank Bari Lieberman from MSOPR for the photo pass and Ralfael Castro from the Rapids Theatre for the ticket ti review the show.
