Photos from Warped Tour at Blossom Music Center

In the past couple of years, Warped Tour has fully embraced a louder and faster style of punk rock under the (pretty good) assumption that teens like it loud. Real loud. While that approach has sustained the tour, enabling it to outlast every other traveling festival, it has also meant that there has been a certain sameness to the music. While that was still the case at this year’s incarnation that rolled into Blossom yesterday, the concert featured a bit more musical diversity. That said, acts such as the hard rock group We the Kings and hardcore heroes Ghost the King drew some of the biggest crowds of the day while the inventive six-piece hip-hop act Air Dubai, a group that sounded like a more soulful Sublime, played to a sparse crowd in front of a nearly empty pavilion. Electronic artists and DJs were also confined to a tiny stage behind the box office where they played to relatively small crowds. A crew of underground rappers huddled beside that stage and entertained a small throng of fans by simply passing the microphone and freestyling between sets. Their antics proved to be one of the show’s true highlights and helped offset the tried and true punk rock that dominated the line-up.