Marianas Trench rocks O-Week

Laurier’s on-campus celebration brought the Tyler Schwende Band, Inward Eye and Marianas Trench to Orientation Week last Tuesday.

The three bands performed at the Turret to an audience comprised entirely of first-year students and volunteers, creating a typical O-Week atmosphere with lots of cheering, clapping and dancing – their intensity shifting with each band.

Tyler Schwende Band

First to take stage, the Tyler Schwende Band was relatively well received, especially considering that probably very few audience members had ever heard of them.

Frontman Schwende prompted further appreciation by announcing himself as a proud Laurier alumnus.

This move was particularly savvy considering it was O-Week and practically everyone in attendance was psyched to be a Golden Hawk.

Even people who appeared to have never been to a concert in their lives were nodding offbeat and clapping incessantly as though they were having the time of their lives. Regardless of the audience’s reaction, the band was a good choice for O-Week, exuding maturity while also having a lot of fun.

Inward Eye

Up next was Inward Eye. Fronting this band was the jokingly self-described “cock with the walk,” Dave Erickson. His brothers, Kyle on guitar and Anders on the drums, make up of the rest of the band.

In an interview with The Cord, the brothers discussed how they hope to avoid popular music furor.

They pride themselves on being “organic live” stating “almost all bands you see live play with backing tracks … but that’s something we don’t do.”

Naturally, this came across in their show. Inward Eye had incredible stage presence and performed with the crowd in mind. Anders did some seriously fancy drumstick-twirling while Kyle played his guitar behind his head and with a drumstick.

The vocalist and bassist broke out a tambourine over which the crowd went nuts.

And at the end of their set, the audience chanted a classic Laurier O-Week cheer: “amazing,” complete with hand actions and all.

Marianas Trench

The headliner, Marianas Trench, hit the stage at 11:15 p.m. – finally, a band the crowd had actually heard of.

This was made clear by the audience’s singing along to a number of songs and filling in lyrical lulls prompted by vocalist Josh Ramsay.

Ramsay is the clear leader of Marianas Trench; he undoubtedly outshined the rest of the band, proving to be a true frontman.

He related to the audience by telling personal narratives and chatting with audience members, showing appreciation rather than talking at them as many musicians do.

Marianas Trench’s “pop-y” listener friendly sound also enabled audience members to dance and sing along even if they didn’t know the songs very well.

At the end of their set, Marianas Trench was called back for an encore. They sang a lesser-known song focusing on vocal melody, which one of the audience members described as “very boy-bandish,” then ended the night with fan favorite, “Cross My Heart.”