If you’re like me (and you probably are), you get a ton of emails informing you about upcoming concerts in your area. Most of them are negligible – I’m not particularly interested in traveling to Wallingford, CT to see Jewel – but I read every single one to stay informed and plan out how I can reasonably make it to most of the shows I want to see.
Being based an hour train ride to New York City makes things considerably easier, and I should be grateful to have dozens of music venues within reach for the myriad of shows I want to attend – but everyone would be lying if they said they didn’t appreciate convenience. There’s a certain cost-effectiveness to seeing a show five minutes from home at Jones Beach, as opposed to seeing one an hour away at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester. There’s an inverse relationship between distance travelled to a show and how much I like the artist, and I think this rings true for most music fans. For example, I wouldn’t travel to PNC Bank Arts Center to see Staind and Godsmack, but if they were playing at the beach, I might take a flyer on a cheap ticket for the pure novelty of it. As a man who was once quoted as saying he wouldn’t go see the Toadies if they were playing in my basement, I value my time when it comes to shows, and it largely relates to the quality of the artist, the cost of the ticket, and the time I need to dedicate to travelling to and from the show.
Certain concerts, though, are automatic purchases. There are some bands, and this varies from person to person, which invite you to throw caution to the wind and buy tickets without much of a plan as to how you’re going to get there and back. So when I learned that Shadows Fall had announced a show at Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, NJ, to commemorate their 2004 classic The War Within, I rushed to buy a ticket without considering any of the above. I believe I bought presale due to pure excitement, even though, as far as I know, the show didn’t even sell out.
Shadows Fall rose quickly in the metal scene as part of the New Wave of American Heavy Metal, along with bands like Lamb of God, God Forbid, and Mastodon, in the early 2000s. They released a string of impressive albums, none of which had more commercial promotion and success than The War Within. I saw them early on at Ozzfest 2003, while they were touring in support of 2002’s The Art of Balance, but I had never seen them do a proper headlining show, despite many opportunities. When the band stopped performing live in 2015, I thought I’d missed that chance forever.
Maybe a year or so ago, the band’s social media started to become active again, which got the wheels turning in my head about a possible reunion tour. They had played a one-off reunion show in their home state of Massachusetts in December 2021, and proceeded to play a handful of festivals and a cruise over the next two years. Usually when a band starts playing those kinds of events, the full-on reunion tour is right around the corner.
That wasn’t the case with Shadows Fall. They announced one show. The show I bought a ticket for in Sayreville, New Jersey, which is a good 90 minutes from where I live without traffic. A place I’d only been to one time prior (to see Motion City Soundtrack’s farewell tour in 2014 - they’re still touring this year). Thankfully, I had a friend interested in going to the show who was also willing to drive – a true saint.
Like before any show, we planned out to the best of our ability how we could maximize our time. We asked ourselves the usual preshow questions, like how early do we need to leave in order to avoid traffic, were the opening bands any good, and what the curfew for the venue is. These questions led to the inevitable concert math: if doors are at 7pm, and the show starts at 8pm, and there are three opening bands, what time do we think the headliner will go on? We formulated a plan to the best of our knowledge and planned to arrive sometime around 8pm and go from there, having no interest in seeing any of the openers.
Much to our delight, we pulled in around 8pm as planned and noticed there was a bar across the street. Great, we thought, now we don’t have to waste an hour on the opening bands and can just go enjoy a drink or two before we hear one of the better metal albums from the 2000s in its entirety. From our estimation, based on a curfew of 11pm, the band could go on anywhere from 9:30pm – 9:45pm, depending on how long their set was planned out to be.
The bar that we saw actually turned out to be a VFW Hall. After slight hesitation, we decided to go in anyway. To our surprise, many concertgoers had the same idea as us. We were met with Pantera playing on the jukebox and several men dressed in black vests with metal band patches on them. There was a looping security video feed on one of the TVs that was switching back and forth between footage of the bar, the parking lot, and what seemed to be a Sweet 16 going on in another room. A bizarre, but welcoming scene.
While we sat there listening to someone doing their best Eddie Trunk impression on the jukebox, we asked some of the patrons what time they thought the band was going on. Some guessed the same as us and we speculated about what they’d play outside of the album promised. Everything was seemingly going great until one guy, who was in the know, mentioned to us that he knew when the band was actually going on.
10:45pm.
I was horrified. How could that be? That’s 15 minutes before curfew. Unless…there is no curfew?
Maybe I’m getting old, or maybe venues don’t enforce curfews when they’re in the middle of nowhere, but a band getting off stage around midnight in this day and age just doesn’t happen. I refused to believe this man. He continued to insist, and each time we asked, in true ball busting fashion, he made the start time later and later as we became increasingly crestfallen and despondent.
At around 9:30pm, still with a sliver of hope that this man was a liar, we entered the venue to find that we’d arrived towards the beginning of Fit for an Autopsy’s setlist. He was right.
Dejected, and still having to wait, I subconsciously began to place more pressure on Shadows Fall than they deserved during their first headlining show in more than two years. The delayed start time, the amount of travel, the undoubtedly late bed time – the band had better deliver.
We tried to find ways to kill time inside the venue. Standing on the merch line only took about 10 minutes, and we couldn’t stand the smell or general intoxicated state of everyone in the smoking area outside for too long. Faced with no other options, we stood in the back of the venue and waited for the lead singer of Fit for an Autopsy to say the magic words:
“Alright, we’ve got time for one more…”
From that point on, my mood changed from disdain for the circumstances to youthful anticipation of seeing a band headline a show for the first time. We’d positioned ourselves well for the main act – stage left near the bar, close enough to get a good view but far enough away from what would undoubtedly become the circle pit.
And then, mercifully, at 10:37pm (but who’s counting?)…
Lead singer Brian Fair, still sporting his trademark body-length dreadlocks, launched into “Thoughts Without Words” from the band’s breakthrough album The Art of Balance. Lead guitarist Jon Donais shredded through a series of solos, clad in a Bon Jovi t-shirt to pay homage to him in his home state, while Fair stage dived into a frenzied crowd. Jason Bittner furiously pounded his drum kit, and every one of my worries about my bed time faded away.
Donais and Bittner had spent time in other bands since Shadows Fall’s hiatus in 2015, and are still touring members of Anthrax and Overkill, respectively. But on this evening, the band sounded as if they hadn’t skipped a beat between their last full scale tour and the performance I was witnessing. Fair delivered both harsh and clean vocals with power and passion, turning in a vocal performance that could have occurred 20 years prior when the band was just starting out. Rhythm guitarist Matt Banchard filled in the gaps perfectly with his backing vocals as the band opened with three songs from their early work: “Of One Blood,” the aforementioned “Thoughts Without Words,” and a personal favorite of mine, “Destroyer of Senses.”
From there, the band launched into The War Within, though they played around with the tracklisting a bit. Fair noted that they hadn’t played the deeper tracks live in a while, if at all, including “Stillness,” which saw its live debut at the show. The highlight of the evening may have been “What Drives the Weak,” perhaps the band’s most commercially successful song, into “Enlightened by the Cold,” another one of the stronger tracks on the album. The record’s closing song, “Those Who Cannot Speak,” was another high point of the evening. Though the song has rarely been played live, it’s another sparkling offering from the band’s catalog.
Rather than pull the traditional walk off stage for an encore, Fair told the already buzzing crowd that the band was going to play a few more songs before ending. They brought out God Forbid’s drummer Corey Pierce, a local legend in metal circles, to play drums on “Fleshold.” The band rounded out the set with songs from their later records before closing with “Redemption” from 2007’s Threads of Life, which rivals “What Drives the Weak” in terms of commercial success.
Fair thanked the crowd throughout the evening, praising Jersey as always delivering the wildest shows for the band, which was why they selected Starland Ballroom as the venue for this special show. It remains to be seen if it was a one-off show for the album anniversary or not – the band did play the next day in Wallingford, Connecticut, but it was a shorter set of 12 songs and did not include all the album’s tracks. He also noted that the band was working on new music, meaning a new album and tour cycle may be in the works in the future.
As I walked out of the venue around midnight, I reflected on the incredible show I had just witnessed. I’d waited a long time to see this band perform live and they exceeded my expectations in every aspect. As I’ve said before, when your favorite bands get older, there’s always the question of whether or not they still have it – and Brian Fair and company resoundingly still do.
I did have one critique, which I shared with a passing fan in the parking lot – “can’t believe they didn’t close with ‘Stepping Outside the Circle’” – one of their more well-known songs. I guess you can add that to my list of minor inconveniences I suffered through to witness this incredible performance: setlist omissions, opening bands, lengthy car rides, a 10:30pm start time, and future lack of sleep.
But I saw something I never thought I would see. And something that might never happen again. I guess the moral of the story is: that’s why you always go to the show, no matter how much of an old man you are.
