SHOUT 2009: Return of the Light

So last night was SHOUT 2009: Return of the Light.

Shout is a worship concert our Church organized, well I really should say our Church Youth (4him) and the Worship team organized. In simple terms the concert was well… AMAZING.

So we had three “bands” performing. Two of which were our Church Worship team, and one was a special team from Thailand called the Leviticans. The Leviticans is a worship team that my friend Caleb plays Bass for, he managed to get his band to come and play for us, which rocked.

So… basically, there were a TON of people. I thought there would be more but I think that we had just about the right number of people. A lot of (boring, or too old to be jumping, or they couldn’t take the noise) people did sit in the back but the (standing/jumping/dancing) crowd in the front did a very good job of jumping about and having lots of fun.

The first band didn’t sound that good and they probably had a good number of reasons why. First off, the power went off and we went to generator, which probably messed up the speakers a good bit. Second off I heard that the monitors went off and that probably messed everyone up. Still, the bass and the drums sounded great for most of the performance.

The second band was the Leviticans, and they were AMAZING. Everyone else had vocal issues (because the mics weren’t loud enough) but Chris (their vocalist) has a very loud voice and he managed to sound pretty good throughout his performance. The band was also very good. I heard them play one song on Friday and I wasn’t too impressed with their drummer (who didn’t seem to build up properly) but he was amazing during the concert. Their lead guitarist did an amazing job IMO and had a pretty cool solo (as always, I love guitar soloing, shame he only had one). The crowd was really wild during their entire performance. We had a train going through, some people (like me :D) were headbanging and EVERYONE was jumping up and do during the choruses, if not the entire performance. I think the best song was their ending song (because the “encore”) “Solution” which was AMAZING.

Last performance was also not that bad. Max did vocals and he has a nice voice. His only problem is he needs to learn to control it more and not sing off his throat. He’s getting better, but by the last song (Paint this Town Red???? Chorus was “we’re gonna paint this town red with the Blood of Jesus) his voice sounded pretty… well screechy and bad. The crowd didn’t have that much energy by that last performance because well… we were all really tired! Still, we had a train and during the last song, “One Way” any energy the crowd had left was used up.

I had an amazing time there. I think the entire thing was a testament to how good God is. It took us three years to organize the event and a lot of things went wrong, both during and before the concert, still, the entire thing went off well. All the bands played as good as they could and besides the first band, which sounded pretty band, everyone did great.

All I can really say is I can’t wait for SHOUT 2010! And that hopefully it will happen before I leave! :D

Also personally, I think with this concert each year should be bigger. First time it was kinda just thrown together by a few key people. We had like 4 bands and it lasted FOREVER. To me I remember it feeling more like a somewhat louder worship session than a proper concert.

However, it took us three years to organize a second one. I think our major problem this time was money, because we had to pay for our speakers and our budge was actually really small. However, we did get everything together and managed to get all the money we needed, which was awesome.

I think our next goal for SHOUT should be to rent a Hall or proper place where the concert can take place so that we can have better acoustics, because, no matter how you work it, our church has just plain bad acoustics. Eventually I do think it would be great if a big band from the US like Switchfoot, Kutless or Leeland (actually it would be EPIC if Leeland could come and give us a proper full on concert!) could come and give us a performance. Matt mentioned it would be weird our church band performing with them but I think, if our Church band could open for them that would work perfectly. That and actually I think our church has some very talented performers. They might not be as technically proficient or as good song-writers, but they have the anointing of God to worship and that’s all they need!

And… I’m rambling. Chemistry beckons… I’ll write more later.