Less Than Jake & Bowling For Soup, Leeds 2024

It's been a while since we'd been to a gig so we were looking forward to a night out in Leeds. I'm a big fan of Less Than Jake and it's been 10 years (almost to the day) since we last saw them play so it was good to see them again.

They played mostly classics, with only one track from the most recent album but they played a lot of my favourite songs so I was happy regardless. As a band, they're very tight and put on a good show. Surprisingly, they didn't rile up the crowd like they've been known to do in the past (mainly by encouraging people to start circle pits), perhaps they're calming down a bit as they get older?

Bowling For Soup closed out the evening. They're a band whose discography I've only really dipped a toe. I know their most well-known songs and a few more random ones, I was glad to hear them play some of the songs I was familiar with (including the theme song for Phineas and Ferb).

Despite it being a good show overall, I'm going to risk sounding like an old curmudgeon by commenting on the sound levels.

The support act and Less Than Jake sounded fine to me. I had earplugs in, though evidently not properly considering my ears are still ringing, so I was able to hear the music really well. For some reason, once Bowling For Soup hit the stage they seemed to crank up the volume. There were definitely moments where it just felt like wall of sound, unable to discern any individual component perhaps bar the drums.

I know live gigs are loud but sometimes they can be unnecessarily loud and I think organisers should take a bit more responsibility in making sure they get the right balance of the live & loud experience without potentially causing any adverse issues to hearing.

If you deafen your crowd now, you're killing your future crowd...