New Found Glory shreds through the Bluebird

Some bands will always hold a special place in your heart no matter how old you get. Last Thursday night New Found Glory tore through Denver on its 10-year anniversary tour for its classic album Sticks And Stones.

The sold-out show at The Bluebird was, as one might expect, packed to the brim. The crowd was made up of folks whose hairlines have recently started to recede. The night was clearly a trip down high-school memory lane for the whole room.

The evening kicked off with performances by Seahaven and The Story So Far, even though most of the crowd seemed to wait until nearly 10 to see their favorite high school band punk-rock ass-kick them for an hour.

When the lights finally dimmed and the band poured through the darkness and onto the stage the crowd went nuts. Without so much as a word NFG rushed loudly into the first track from Sticks And Stones, “Understatement,” which ran headlong into “My Friends Over You.” The two songs felt like high school anthems for the whole room.

The Florida–based rock band has been rocking and releasing albums—seven total—since 1997, putting many of the members well into their 30s, though they haven’t slowed down a bit. From the first chord the teenage punk energy was present everywhere.

Every song from Sticks And Stones was done faithfully and with little change to anything except for the tempos, which felt bumped on every track to help keep the liveliness sky-high.

The 12 songs from Sticks And Stones came and went quickly in a solid wave of sorts, leaving The Bluebird with little time to breathe. The final track from the album, the slower “The Story So Far,” felt lackluster and forced before the lights dimmed and the band exited stage left. However, the crowd seemed to care very little and almost immediately began chanting “NFG!”

When the band jumped its way back on stage Chad Gilbert informed the crowd with a wink that now that the album was over the night was just beginning and the band piled into “All Downhill From Here” from 2004’s Catalyst.

The rest of the evening felt like a stroll down memory lane as the band ran through a collection of older tracks off its first two albums, Nothing Gold Can Stay (1999) and New Found Glory (2000), with tracks like “Dressed To Kill” and “Sincerely Me.”

When a fight broke out during the last song of the night the band stopped the song, took time to inform everyone that anyone fighting was welcome to leave, and proceeded to start the classic “Hit Or Miss” from the very first note once again, and the crowd loved it.

NFG exited the stage with a bang and the crowd filed back out into the cold, as satisfied as anyone could ask for from one hell of a nostalgic night.