Yellowcard wasted no time jumping into its nearly two hour set last night at House of Blues, opening with “Awakening” and “Surface of the Sun,” the first two tracks off its newest album Southern Air. The energy continued from there with the crowd-pleasing “Way Away.” It wasn’t until after the fifth song, “Shrink the World,” that the band took a breath, as singer Ryan Key then restarted the “nonstop rocking” with a “traditional Yellowcard circle pit” for yet another new song “Rivertown Blues.” Later, the band performed “Holly Wood Died” with the help of a string orchestra (on a backing track). Key explained that violinist Sean Mackin writes all the classical string chords, and “since an entire orchestra won’t fit on stage, we backed it to play tonight.” It was clearly a lesser known song by the sold out crowd, but the round of applause for Mackin proved it a hit. An acoustic version of “I Will Wait,” a Mumford & Sons cover, slowed things down around the middle of the set. “We don’t usually do covers because we don’t like to conform. I mean, we have a violinist,” Key said. Though the song gave the band a breather, the audience continued to crowd surf through it, something it managed to do every song of the night.
