By Sunday began as a blistering cold day, with the last day of theBamboozle Left festival as the ray of light.
I tried to hold back my sniffling nose as I walked across the large Cal Poly Pomona campus, to the large field where the stages and tents were set up. The steps up reminded me a lot of the Vans Warped Tour, minus sunshine and dust. There were many of the same clothing vendors at the show, selling what were probably the rejects of the summer tour clothing that never sold (and for a good reason).
One of the first groups I came across that day were the wannabe punk rockers Escape the Fate. The group’s music was very pop punk-ish, but the band’s image was that of a gutter punker persona.
Yellowcard was one of the first headlining bands to take the stage that day, and the band never stopped pumping out the pop music for the high school-looking kids in the crowd. While playing favorites such as “Away, Away,” “Ocean Avenue” and “Lights and Sounds,” the band never seemed to slow as it blasted through the 30-minute set.
Chris Conley from Saves the Day played an acoustic set on the Epitaph stage just as the sun set. Conley’s hair was still light pink, left over from the Warped Tour, but he looked cool and calm, setting in a cheap plastic chair, smiling at the large crowd in front of him. He had no set list of songs he was going to play. Instead he played whatever his adoring fans shouted at him.
The crowd’s voices sang the loudest during the song “Freakish,” from the 2001 cult hit “Stay What You Are.”
Orange County rockers Thrice took the stage to the loudest applause heard that day and began with “Hoods on Peregrine,” from the break-out album “Artist in the Ambulance.” Thrice played a good mix of songs from all of its albums, including two new songs from the band’s upcoming album.
The album will be a four-disc set, with each CD featuring a theme of either earth, wind, fire or water. The earth song Thrice featured was a slow mix of rock and country, but it was not as upbeat as the band’s previous songs. So the set felt a little broken in that aspect.
However, Thrice did close with crowd favorites “The Earth Will Shake” and “Red Sky” from the 2005 release “Vheissu.”
Brand New ended the night with a set mixed songs and ended the night with MTV hit “Sic Transit Gloria… Glory Fades.”
Overall, I felt the festival could have had some bigger names or more diverse music. The festival didn’t seem to have appealed to the college crowd, with most of the bands being more pop-punk. However, Chris Conley and Thrice were by far the best bands of the day and I have hope that Bamboozle Left will pull through next year.
