“Love” and “Family” were two words that were thrown around a lot during Cold’s set and it was a great sense of love and family that was felt by the packed house Friday night at the Stafford Palace Theater in Connecticut when the quintet made a triumphant return to the stage on the second night of their current “Broken Human” tour.
Led by vocalist Scooter Ward, the band lovingly welcomed the Cold Army back into the fold with open arms with bassist Lindsay Manfredi and guitarists Jon Nova and Nick Coyle all providing a solid sonic wall of emotional riffs. While Ward planted himself firmly amongst the people at center stage when the band kicked off “Everyone’s A Devil” (Cold Army scholars will recognize this as originally by pre-Cold outfit Grundig), behind him was the highlight to end all upcoming highlights when original Grundig/Cold drummer Sam McCandless was revealed to be the person manning the kits for the tour.
From there, the quintet ripped through a lengthy set that went back to the beginning (“Give” off of 1998’s Cold), highlighted the hits (“Stupid Girl”, “No One”), delivered crowd favorites (“Back Home”, “It’s All Good”), and pure Cold classics (“Just Got Wicked”, “End Of The World”). Peppered throughout the set were tastes of Cold’s upcoming sixth studio album, The Things We Can’t Stop, including the driving “Without You” and the anti-bullying anthem “Shine” which began the band’s encore set for the night which was capped by a moving rendition of “Feel It in Your Heart” from 2005’s A Different Kind of Pain.
Starting the evening off were University Drive who delivered a powerful set of modern alt-rawk, the bulk of which was culled from their latest release Clear (Which you can check out here). Following them was Italy’s Awake For Days, on their first tour of the U.S., who almost stole the show with their blend of Chevelle meets Breaking Benjamin meets Earshot hard rawk on songs like “Break Your Chains” and “With You” as well as select tracks from Magnificent Disorder (Which you can hear by clicking here).
The Things We Can’t Stop is coming through Napalm Records on September 13th (Our review is here) and can be pre-ordered by clicking here. To find out where you can catch the band on their current tour, head here or here.