The fourth round of the 17th Annual High School Rock Off, which took place yesterday afternoon at House of Blues featured another 11 bands competing for a spot at the upcoming Final Exam. Like Round 3, this round was dominated by hard rock acts. Ironically enough, the hard rock acts weren’t the ones that advanced to the Final Exam.
The hard rocking Kevlar started the four-and-a-half hour concert off with a bang. While the band’s music was a bit derivative of the post-grunge that was so popular in the late ’90s, the Erie-based band benefited from terrific musicianship. The band regularly plays clubs in town and even had CDs for sale. The members of M4, another band out of Erie, were technically too young to advance to the next round but decided to compete anyway just for the hell of it. Their female singer’s voice often sounded shrill, but the youngsters held their own against the older kids, delivering a set of original material and a few covers (include their take on Muse’s “Hysteria”).
This article appears in Jan 16-22, 2013.
There is a silent mantra which moves through the city tonight. It speaks of red skies and freezing H2O. It gives hints of ice-fishing and igloos and the adaptation of life…..any where. The Spring will soon change the minds of ice and Winter into temperatures and smells of hope and Lilac which will transport us like a laser beam back to a time of youth and the smells of Lilac and Easter; revolation and re-birth and metamorphisis. We will feel John The Baptist on our rivers of the Rocky and the Cuyahoga and welcome him to come in from the wild and the eating of Locust and Honey to the smells of Spring and the tastes of compost and the produce which it will bring fourth in our Urban Gardens of Cleveland. “Fish. flesh and foul commend; whatever is begotten, born, and dies in the sensual music of time and life and space and humanity and the history which cries out to be realized and felt.