Recap: Four Year Strong at Northern Lights

This year’s AP Tour made a pit stop at Northern Lights on Tuesday. This year’s bill brought headliners Four Year Strong, with Gallows, Title Fight, The Swellers and Sharks. This year marked the third-annual fall seasonal trek for the AP Tour, which combines the bands the magazine covers with the opportunity to see five of them play together all on one bill.

photo: andrew franciosa

AP Tour has brought together various shades of punk rock including the likes of Bring Me The Horizon, August Burns Red, Emarosa, Polar Bear Club, This Is Hell, Mayday Parade, The Academy Is…, Set Your Goals, The Secret Handshake and You Me At Six in years past. Other highlights of the tour include free copies of AP magazine (which goes on newsstands for $6), as well as certain tiers of ticket purchases including a one-year subscription, the opportunity to be an AP-featured video journalist and so on.

Andrew and I arrived just in time for the headliner, Four Year Strong, who jumped into their set without wasting any time. FYS is a 4-piece from Worcester, Mass, and are celebrating the upcoming release of their fourth studio album, Some Way, Shape or Form due out November 9th of this year.

The crowd that gathered in anticipation for FYS was one that was already soaked in sweat from the acts prior. The energy didn’t settle, and FYS picked up on that, playing the songs that people came to hear, which was delivered as a mixture from their catalog, playing off of 2010’s Enemy of the World such as with set opener “What the Hell Is a Gigawatt?” and then delivering their latest single, “Stuck in the Middle.” They dove into 2007’s Rise or Die Trying playing “Prepare to Be Digitally Manipulated,” and “Bada Bing! Wit’ a Pipe!” The crowd wasn’t as dense as some of Northern Lights recent shows, (the venue recently ranked No. 51 among musical venues worldwide in tickets sold in 2010) but for those in attendance, this show was all that mattered; people were crowd surfing and toppling over each other left and right. Other highlight tracks from the show included “Tonight We Feel Alive (On a Saturday)”, “It Must Suck to be Four Year Strong,” and the set closer of “Heroes Get Remembered.”

Frontman Alan Day very much encouraged singing along and the crowd happily obliged. Tag teaming vocals with bassist Joe Weiss made their newer songs fit in with their older material. Their energetic, melodic sound has been a formula that works quite well for them live and was rather enjoyable, even from the perspective outside of the bubbling mosh pit. At one point, Day parted the crowd like the Red Sea and encouraged the crowd to create a whirlpool of sweat, chanting and healthy (?) rage. The band finished up, just prior to 11pm, encoring with “Wasting Time”.