Young the Giant
Photos By: Summer Luu
By: Amanda Martinek
Sunday night brought swarms and swarms of sweaty sixteen year olds to SOMA in support of SoCal local band Young The Giant. How’s that for alliteration? Walking into venue, I thought I might have been slipped hallucinogens because SOMA had grown exponentially larger since the last time I was there. The sold-out show packed a body-to-body crowd in a warehouse type arena, mostly filled with extremely tall dudes. I caught the last half of opener Cayucas, and when I say caught, I mean heard as a stared at the ceiling and the back of a shaved head for their set.
Young the Giant didn’t make everyone wait too long (on the account of it being a school night and all) and kicked off their set with a new track of their newly released album Mind Over Matter. The band sounded great despite SOMA’s slight feedback problem, as they powered through new songs and peppered their set with favorites off their debut self-titled 2010 album. I was actually shocked at how popular they’ve gotten in the four years following their debut. But the right combination of commercial catchiness, radio support and being all around lovely humans fed fire to the flame.
Unfortunately I could not see the majority of their show due to this amassing popularity and an uneven tall human to short human ratio, but they sounded great and clearly have massive talent. My favorite songs surprisingly were not the upbeat crowd favorites like “My Body” or “Cough Syrup” but the slow, beautiful, melancholy numbers like “Firelight”. This might just be because the rest of the crowd went to sleep and I could finally see the stage.
Either way, I’m definitely looking forward to Young The Giant coming back to San Diego and playing Sleep Train Amphitheatre so I definitely won’t even be able to see their tiny bodies from the grass section.