Tonight Alive / Set It Off / The Ready Set @ Union Transfer

Sydney, Australia’s Tonight Alive are an unlikely force to be reckoned with. Fresh off the heels of their brand new record Limitless, the pop rock quintet are on their biggest North American tour to date. Co-headlining with Set It Off with support from The Ready Set and SayWeCanFly, the band are proving themselves worthy of that record’s title.

The Ready Set are still here. Whether you’ve been meticulously keeping up with Jordan Witzigreuter’s project or not, the guy knows how to command a room just as much as he did in 2008. With a new record coming out on Hopeless Records next month, The Ready Set played the field with new tracks and some staples in the form of “Love Like Woe” and “Give Me Your Hand”.

Next up were Set It Off, a band that seem to be gaining momentum at a rapid pace. It’s easy for me to say that the majority of the room was there for this band, by the way people bum-rushed the barricade and sang along at an impressive rate. Opening with fan-favorite “Forever Stuck in Our Youth”, Set It Off blazed through a thirteen-song set of tracks from 2012’s Cinematics and 2014’s Duality with precision and poise. Vocalist Cody Carson didn’t miss a beat and could easily be a frontrunner in this strange little niche of soulful pop rock. The band closed out their set with their latest single “Why Worry”.

Tonight Alive opened their bombastic set with “To Be Free”, the first track from their brand new record Limitless. Vocalist Jenna McDougall graciously expressed her love for the room, the States, and her bandmates for the overwhelming response to Limitless and for the energy as they whirled through a fourteen-song set. In the middle, McDougall and guitarist Whakaio Taahi sat at the edge of the stage to perform both “What Are You So Scared Of?” and “The Other Side” in their acoustic forms before picking things back up with Limitless‘ “Human Interaction” and “The Edge” from 2013’s The Other Side. To say that Tonight Alive command a room is a massive understatement, as everyone there was more than willing to interact when necessary and to shout their lyrics back at them with full force. I don’t personally know what it’s like to see Tonight Alive over in Australia, but I surely hope that it’s as impressive as it is when they tour through the States.

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