ROSfest 2015

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Well it was my first ROSfest and as expected my experience was 'mixed'. 

Typically these types of bands are not really my thing but there were a couple I thought I would enjoy and I knew a lot of friends would be there so I decided to have an open mind and make sure I enjoyed myself.

On the plus side, the venue is great, comfortable, good sound and about the right size. While Gettysburg surely has a lot of history it did seem a bit too touristy for my tastes. I found a couple of good pubs for food and drink (The Pub and Garryowen) though they seemed to be pretty busy most of the time. The festival was very well organized, the bands generally sounded good (except for some muddy sound with the first band), lighting was good, it ran on time. Well done everyone.

On the social side it was great to see so many friends and have enough time between bands to chat about something and nothing. I also got to meet a few people I know online in person for the first time. The after parties were great with even more time for drinking and chatting. The social side was really the highlight of the festival for me.

I'm not going to rate the bands as I knew going in there were going to be several that really aren't my thing and it wouldn't be fair to them. They were all mostly technically very strong, engaged and friendly with the audience, looked like they were having a good time and brought energy to their sets. George seems to know what he is doing with the line up as there were many many standing ovations and most bands seemed to be received as good to excellent. I found something to enjoy in most of the bands.

Personally only two bands really stood out to me based on my tastes, I've known Sonus Umbra for a while and they were the only band I own an album by, they were very strong with excellent interplay between the members, interesting dynamics in the music and a lot of fun. Haken were noteworthy purely for how different they were from everyone else. Pretty straight forward Prog Metal with a showman vocalist, I'll certainly check out there albums to see if it sticks beyond a fun live set.

Of the other bands I enjoyed Spocks Beard more than I expected, they were very tight, were having fun and had some good tunes. Clearly a well oiled machine. They probably benefit from being one of the early bands up. I enjoyed the first couple of tracks Lo-Fi Resistance did without the full band which were interesting. For the rest of the set they were fairly generic unless they cranked up the heaviness when they sounded great. Strattman had some spacey post rock feel I liked. Of the rest I found something to like in all of them.

My biggest issue was the similarity of a lot of the bands that played, it clearly wasn't an issue for the audience as they loved it. By mid Sunday I was burned out on the neo prog set up with all the bands starting to sound the same. They pretty much all had two guitarists, synth's featured heavily and harmonized vocals. All the bands seemed to specialize in over emoted vocals, lots of solo's and highly structured songs. By the end I was crying out for someone to have some other instrument, I know a bassoon or cello are probably out of the question but would a saxophone or violin be too difficult?

Overall a great weekend I really enjoyed with lots of friends and some good music and some stuff to explore more.