Rock on the Range 2014!

What a fest! So many bands, and my first open air experience! 3 stages, parallel gigs. Couldn’t manage to catch all of the bands that played (who can possibly go to a gig at 11am? :/ ), of them Trivium, Wolfmother and Mastodon were a sore miss. Of the rest, there were plenty of highs, and some lows.

Highlights: 

Friday, May 16

Killswitch Engage - 'Holy Diver' (the start of familiarity :P) Overall awesome.

Black Label Society - ‘Stillborn'! So missed Ozzy for this one! Their entire gig was brilliance!

Lacuna Coil - My first Gothic Metal band live!! Goth after so long! Oh the joys I can’t put in words! Scabbia and her voice! I miss Vibeke Stene! Would still love to see Tristania live someday

Seether - ‘Broken' (meh very broken indeed. They had a very eager crowd, but the gig felt flat and sad)

Down - That insane bass setup. Could feel every nerve thumping. Best sight to see a mom and daughter (looked 21-ish) attending together, with the girl head banging all over the place with mommy looking on in joy :) Brilliant energy to the gig, out and out hit. ‘Stone the Crow’, thank you, kindly! I truly never died before ;)

Staind - entirely awesome! Played plenty of heavy numbers. Highpoint: Aaron Lewis (to the crowd): “To all the men in the field here, I want to say, your mothers have miserably failed. You think you can grope the crowd surfing girls any which way you like, I don’t see girls grabbing your penises. So stop it already!"

Guns N’ Roses - 'Welcome to the Jungle', 'November Rain', ‘Chinese Democracy’, 'Sweet Child', 'Paradise City'. Axl Rose and his energy! Slash was missed but not so much, they managed to be brilliant even without him. A full 2 set gig! Brilliant end to day one with Paradise City! Post shower cold, and numb limbs, all calmed with the closing number :)

Saturday, May 17

Theory of a Deadman - 'Bitch Came Back' and 'Bad Girlfriend' were most loved by the crowd, haha. The former made it to our car playlist for the next few days. :P Connolly was good!

Exodus - ‘WAAAAR! WARRR! WARRRRR! WAR is my Shepherrrrrrd!!!!!'

Chevelle - Very enthralled. Had run out of seats close to the stage at the stadium by this point, so were standing on them stairs the whole while. Start to end hooked. ‘The Red’, of course, was the highpoint.

Slayer - :D To see Tom Araya Live! Almost posted another ‘Life Event’ on FB :P Felt like I was inside one of the many documentaries and gig tapes of theirs I’ve seen. A part of history! ‘God Hates Us All’ and ‘Angel of Death’ highpoint. Wish they’d play ‘Bloodline’ in some gig already! :(

Avenged Sevenfold - My second gig of A7X! Started a full 20 mins late, to pyro and fireworks! Just as brilliant as the last gig, but unlike the 'Hail to the King’ tour, they played quite a few old numbers. ‘Almost Easy’ my highpoint! The first single of theirs I’d picked from the ‘Transformers 2’ album! :P Brilliant energy, neck split at the end of it with all the head banging. Totally worth it! :)

Sunday, May 18

Sore from the previous 2 days, couldn’t wake up in time for Trivium at 1pm! :/ How much I’d spammed my gig-mates with Trivium’s ‘In Waves’ single through the days leading up :( Missed quite a few good ones there. Adelitas Way, Wolfmother, .. barely made it to Mastodon, to the end of it. So the day technically started with Gojira. Turns out we missed ‘Of Mice and Men’ in the process, was on in parallel at the other stage, and from what I heard later, was a great gig. 

Gojira - Heavy! Loud! Must listen to them more often. ‘L’Enfant Sauvage’ gave me goosebumps! Loved ‘em!

Alter Bridge - Umm, okish. ‘Metalingus' highpoint, teehee.

Comedy Tent break with Aaron Kleiber and Jim Breuer. Liked the former more. Santa, Wife and Kids, Alcohol consumption, them stand up comedians have little left to play with lately. Also, missed the band 'Led Zeppelin Experience' in the mean time thanks to the schedule listing them as 'Jason Bonham LZE' :/ Dull day, and minds :P

Five Finger Death Punch - :O Those energy levels! :O Ivan Moody with his seemingly punk appearance and his band playing metal. Morning alarm material. Like I was telling another friend later, performers like these make you do the math. “If only I had 10% of his energy levels, I’d have accomplished this and this by now, been so and so, etc.” :( Highpoints:‘Coming Down’, ‘Bad Company’, ‘Under and Over it’, heck all of it! The crowd being the size it was, every band’s attempt at making them sing along fell flat. 5FDP were the only ones in all 3 days to successfully pull that one off, over and over again. Sheer brilliance!

Left for the trip back home short of Kid Rock’s performance. No rap-rock for us thank you very much :P

Looking forward to Rock on the Range 2015, a definite go!


(Pic Courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/rockontherange)

P.S. - Pls forgive the over usage of the words ‘awesome’ and ‘brilliance’ among others (emots!), can’t help it. And I actually went back and added a few bands that I missed in the first go of writing lol, vices of the plenty :P

Bombay, my love!

Came across this website called India Memory Project. Sheer beauty. Phantoms from the past tugging at you, at the beautiful Indian within you. The stories of the lives lived in black and white India, through pictures. Going over the stories therein, I couldn't help but miss my city all over again. Bombay.

My first love, my joy and my soul, Bombay is one of the many facets that define me. Makes me who I am. No matter how busy or frustrated I get about anything, just a reminiscence of that love washes it all away and I'm at peace again. Love like that is meditation. Joy like that is bliss. This post is difficult to even put in words..but oftentimes I forget who I am or how I am or where I'm going and in that, Bombay roots me. Defines me for who I am and why I am and snaps be back to my core. They may change her name. But she'd always be Bombay to me. The city I call home, the city I've fallen head o'er heels for.

Curbing the lunatic in me from aimlessly romanticising on any more, here's, to conclude, a snippet from a friend with the common love, on his upcoming visit planned for January, 2014:

I can just imagine right now... Being on a plane going back home. As the plane drops below the clouds, I can see a big blotch of light. The plane travels on, hurtling at hundreds of miles an hour towards that blotch. Slowly but surely, that mass of light breaks up into individual, slightly smaller yet still fairly large patches of light. A few spaces of darkness between them. The plane continues flying oblivious of my emotions. It goes on and the lights continue to separate. They fill up the entire landscape visible to me below. Now I can see lights and discern their sources. Some come from buildings, most from streetlamps and cars. The city that never sleeps. Truly never ever sleeps. I pass over a building that I know is my home. The plane lands with a slight jolt, as always. I step out of the plane after it halts. And I breathe. My first breath of air in Bombay after more than a year and a half now. It reeks of refuse and waste. Of smoke and pollution. Of sweat and blood. Of a million dreams shattered. Of love at first sight. Of love after years of being together. Of flowers being sold somewhere on the streets by urchins out to make a last few sales to religious drivers hoping to bribe gods in their favour. Of a billion dreams being dreamt. There are a million things wrong about Bombay and there are a billion things right about it. And each of these things are in the air I breathe in. I am home again.

Fitting portrayal of the mesmerizing drug, Bombay; my love you will always remain.

The Joy of Writing

Early morning class. Incomplete assignments. Overload. Time crunch (need to come up with a fancier/different term). Bored and blank and inattentive at class. Math. Last bench. Smartphone and laptop both dead so nothing to distract myself with. Half hour down into it I shove my notebook aside and pull out my 'Ramble Journal' notebook. And start scribbling away.

The next one hour was bliss! Instant teleportation into a nicer world. All mine. All spelt by the words I use. My opinions. My ideas. My view. The awesomeness vantage point! Beauty and well, for want of a better word, stand-still. I hadn't slept the night before class thanks to all the impending assignments; didn't have time to grab coffee or breakfast in the morning. So was almost cranky. Was looking forward to rush home at end of day and either hitting the sack or catching up with friends (read: force them to since I knew nobody would be around at the hour) or do 10 of the 20 things on my to-do list. But that one hour; one hour of letting all that mental rambling and futility of planning come down on paper and there was instant calm. I was suddenly refreshed and awake. And the entire day looked up from there on. I was suddenly chirpy and cheerful! Like I'd just had a night of restful sleep and sumptuous breakfast! It was amazing!

Novels have been my lifelong companion. Inspite of being the extrovert I've always been, my best friends at the end of the day were usually that couch and novel. For writing, I've lost count of the number of journals I've had over the years. Then came Yahoo 360 blog followed by Blogger. Enter computers and smartphones and reading's been reduced to articles and writing's tweetish status updates or Evernote scribbles. Novels are still something I don't seem to be able to repeal off everything else and sit down with. Feels like sin with the constraints on my time. To enjoy a good novel, I need to be away from distraction (all that jazz). Something I don't get unless I decide to go the woods lately, which I oftentimes do now.

But writing, oh writing! The simple power of picking up a pen and putting it to paper. Or even just a blog post like now. I'm writing this while with friends (who're right now bonding over trying to solve my math assignment for fun!). And I'm here typing away on my smartphone. I usually have better etiquettes than that, but so long it is not Facebook or Twitter or Whatsapp that I'm at, I feel my crime is presently not so bad. I'll make up for it with a cheerful post-blogging me ;)

So yes, writing has taken a precedence over my other hobbies lately and I wish the relationship stays..well..uncomplicated and committed! Hope I can someday graduate from just rambling to actually penning down something meaningful. But even if that doesn't happen anytime soon or ever at all, the writing would never stop for me. So long as there is parchment, I shalt scribble my heart out. Cheerio!

(Blogpost motivation: A friend and me were supposed to attend the weekly Writers' Guild meet today at my university that we missed. So counter deal was to update our respective blogs. Works!)