Ok, everyone. For the next few show reviews, there will be no pictures. The digital camera is, well, deciding not to function. Jon's got it on his to-do list to make a trip down to Best Buy to slap those punks around and let 'em know what's up, but until then, you're all just going to have to suffer and settle for reading our "online journal."

So let's get down to business. Tonight was another great night at Maggie's. A solo artist under the name of "Elias" kicked things off. This guy played acoustic guitar and sang to his original music. Many of the songs told the story of a life of a fictional character, starting with his birth, and following the developments of his parents' divorce, his drug addiction, and the the other stumbling blocks in life. I think Elias said he's going to record the songs as a concept album. The music was somewhere along the lines of Dashboard Confessional, although that's a gross generalization. Great job, man.

On a side note, Alex and Doug have come to a general conclusion concerning Dashboard Confessional. In general, everyone pretty much accepts that it's all highly emotional, and it kinda makes you wanna go give Chris Carraba a hug- well, at least for some people. But when you're actually truly depressed, Dashboard Confessional comes off as kinda fake. "A mockery of true feelings." We just thought we'd throw that out there.

Moving on, we played after Elias. Our show was average. Not terrible, not fantastic. We had a decent crowd watching us, though, and they didn't seem to notice any of our delinquencies and were into the set, so all's well that ends well, I guess. Thanks to everyone who came out to see us. You all rule, and we hope to see you soon at our next Maggie's show.

Next was Hope for August. We've actually been playing quite a few shows with them lately, and I think that trend is going to continue. They're a really solid indie band with a female lead vocalist. They have this song called "New York" that gets in your head and just doesn't leave. We were talking to them about it after the show. Apparently, it's the first song they ever wrote, but people still like it. Kind of like, our "What Went Wrong?" huh. That's the first song we wrote together too, and it's the only song from our "Stand to Reason" days that we still play.

Bringing a close to the show tonight was Jackson's own rock 'n' roll act, Shrump. These guys had some great songs, some really well-done harmonies, and put on a great show. In one song, the lead guitarist even put down his guitar and played the saxophone. This is definately a type of sound we don't hear at our shows too often, but it came off really well. Sweet job, guys.

Well, we left Maggie's just in the nick of time to make it to Ann Arbor to play a show at the place where we started out, Sigma Phi. We'll be back at Maggie's at the end of March, so we'll hope to see you all out there next time. Later.

-Once a Hero