Rise Against raises revolutionary hell at The Sound with L.S. Dunes and Cloud Nothings

It was an evening of blazing tempos and heart-on-sleeve emotions as seminal Chicago punk rockers Rise Against conquered The Sound down in Del Mar on November 22nd for a beyond energetic sold-out final show on their 2024 North American tour.

And perfectly setting the scene for the rest of the night were indie garage rock darlings Cloud Nothings. Absolutely barrelling through a brief but spectacular six song set at double-speed, Jayson Gerycz once again proved why he’s one of the hardest working drummers doing it right now as Dylan Baldi and Christopher Brown thrashed around amidst the beautifully blistering chaos.

L.S. Dunes is a post-hardcore supergroup featuring members of such early-00s genre luminaries as Circa Survive, My Chemical Romance and Coheed & Cambria (among many others), and the rapturous audience response that greeted them as the lights dimmed and Anthony Green passionately belted out the opening words of opener “2022” was nothing less than contagious. He barely stopped moving during the band’s entire 45-minute set, and you could hardly take your eyes off of the emotionally cathartic controlled chaos that was unfolding in front of you.

Finally hitting the stage around 9:30pm with a bottled up megaton force was headliner Rise Against, “Satellite” making for a perfect opener to their hour-plus set. You could tell that the whole band was buoyed by the sudden rush of palpable livewire energy that was emanating off the crowd before the first song even finished, and said high-octane energy carried along undiminished for the entire night across a discography-spanning setlist. Stretching from breakout sophomore record “Revolutions Per Minute” to 2017’s “Wolves”, it was a perfect mix of soaring singles and deep-cut fan favorites (including a acoustic mini-set that functioned like a campfire singalong) that surely left the die-hards as satisfied as those in the crowd who might be new to the fandom.

Midway through their performance frontman Tim McIlrath briefly paused to reflect on how they’d been together as a band for over 25 years at this point with a genuinely moving open-hearted sincerity; how their first San Diego gig was at legendary UCSD co-op music venue The Ché Café (“we just kept wondering who all these kids were here to see, because it couldn’t have been us”), and how they weren’t there tonight to sell anybody a new record or promote any upcoming project or anything like that. They just wanted to play us “a bunch of goddamn songs” and give the fans a proper thank you for sticking with them for the past two decades.

And by the time the final notes of set-closer “Savior” rang chiming out across the venue, that promise was fulfilled as truth ten times over.