Apr 7

Apr 7 Show Review: Beartooth Bring One of Rock's Best Shows of The Year to San Jose

Beartooth
w/ Silverstein, The Devil Wears Prada
April 3rd, 2022
San Jose Civic
San Jose, CA

Photos and Review by Jared Stossel

Here it is: one of the best and heaviest shows of the year. On Sunday night, Beartooth took the stage at the San Jose Civic Auditorium, putting on what I can guarantee will be looked back at as one of the best shows of 2022. Beartooth(the brainchild of former Attack Attack! frontman Caleb Shomo) are currently touring in support of their incredible new album, Below, and their ninety-minute headlining slot shows why they are rising as fast as they are amongst the ranks of today’s rock acts. Shomo leads the room with a fierce intensity. His vocal delivery, whether he’s delivering a powerful vocal line or just speaking to the crowd, makes you want to pay attention to everything he’s saying. He’s come a very long way since the Attack Attack! days, and is finally getting the proper credit he deserves as a musician.

I always mention the openers of shows in these recaps and make it a point to photograph everyone on the bill, and this show was incredibly special. Two scene veterans, The Devil Wears Prada and Silverstein, performed at the top of their game. I saw The Devil Wears Prada last year and thought they were exceptional, but this show was the best I’ve ever seen them in their current iteration. While it wasn’t quite as crazy as the days of neon clothing, hair straighteners, and “HTML Rulez D00d”, the Ohio six-piece were firing on all cylinders. To my absolute shock, they closed their set with “Dogs Can Grow Bears All Over”, a track from their debut album Dear Love: A Beautiful Discord. If you’ve followed this band for as long as I have, you know that they’ve made it clear that they despise the material on their first two albums, particularly their debut. When that down-tuned opening riff kicked in over the PA system, everyone went nuts. As much as I am loving the new material from The Devil Weara Prada, it made me very happy to see them finding something to love in their older material.

Silverstein took the stage next for a pitch-perfect performance. The Canadian post-hardcore act ripped their way through a selection of songs from throughout their nearly ten-album catalogue, including their upcoming release Misery Made Me (available on May 6th). Much like New Found Glory, they’re a band that I’ve found to have never put on a bad show in my experience of seeing them, and this set was no exception to that statement. They’re highly attuned and in sync with each other as performers, and they know how to construct a powerful setlist that showcases the best of their band (to my delight, they performed “Vices” from their 2009 album A Shipwreck in the Sand). Both Silverstein and Prada, each capable of being headliners in their own right, did an excellent job of setting the tone for this show.

Beartooth took the stage with the largest production setup I’ve seen from them in recent years, complete with CO2 cannons, stage risers, and confetti exploding over the crowd as they kicked off the show with “Below” and “Devastation”. Track after track was a call to action for fans to mosh and scream the words back to the five-piece band on stage, whether it came from Below or any of their previous albums like Disease, Aggressive, or Disgusting.

I was fortunate enough to see Beartooth play one of the best performances on the Vans Warped Tour I’ve ever seen, when they closed the Mountain View date back in 2017. It was chaotic yet coherent, with a ferocity and dedication to the craft of performance that I’ve only seen from a handful of bands at this level. Beartooth’s recent San Jose performance knocked that one out of the water. They’re still not as big as they should be, but goddammit do they deserve to be.

Beartooth Set List
Below
Devastation
Aggressive
Hated
Fed Up
Body Bag
The Lines
Beaten In Lips
Afterall
Skin
Phantom Pain
You Never Know
Bad Listener
Disease
In Between

Encore:
The Past Is Dead
The Last Riff