A snapshot of the Banshee Season tour, courtesy of the tri-state’s revered Ehud Lazin.
The tour arrived in New Jersey on July 6 and brought riveting alternative rock to the humid sights and sounds of an early-July night at PNC Bank Arts Center. Both bands played sets that ran the gamut of their respective hits and fan favorites, certainly bringing the party to the Central NJ amphitheater.
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Photos by Ehud Lazin
Dashboard Confessional’s subtly introverted frontman, Chris Carrabba, always shows up on stage with charisma, smiling with a guitar in hand like he was born that way. On this night he rocked sunglasses and tore into 12 tracks. About halfway through that set he let guitarist Armon Jay take the setlist reins for a song. Why? It was his 10th anniversary with his wife. What did he choose? The short, but sweet 2001 classic: “Saints and Sailors.” The rendition we got here at PNC was an amplified take on the MTV Unplugged version that Carrabba and Dashboard originally spun in 2002.
Counting Crows followed suit with 15 songs, including a Grateful Dead cover and a Joni Mitchell cover. Both were exuberant takes on the originals, but still paid homage to the instrumentation and messages at hand. Vocalist Adam Duritz breathes life into anything and everything, though, and this concert and these covers were no exception. For their four song (!) encore, the Crows brought Dashboard back out for two on-stage collaborations: “So Long, So Long” and “Hanginaround.” By this point, if some of the audience was a fas of one band more than the other, the respective crowds were wholeheartedly intertwined and enjoying every musician equally. As Lazin’s photos for us show, having a good time the entire night was easy.
