It seems that 311 has toured under the unity tour headline for years. I know they used the name in 2007 when I caught the summer tour in Denver, and according to their Wikipedia page the same was true for the 2006, 2009, and 2010 tours. But why fix something if it isn’t broken? Saturday night Kim and I attended their performance down at Riverbend and it was just as good as any of their other shows I have seen in the past 15 years.

Beautiful Disaster

Their latest album, Universal Pulse, was released today. Though I haven’t heard the studio release, the band played the first three songs from the album at various points on Saturday. “Sunset in July” is this first single and was by far the catchiest of the three. The rest of the set (full setlist) consisted of nineteen songs, mostly from their oldest material, which happens to be my favorite material. Only one song was played from their previous two releases, which I have honestly haven’t heard that much of, so I was more than okay with that. The set closing combination of “Do You Right” followed by “Creatures (For a While)” was awesome.

Feels So Good

Though we arrived a little later than I had originally planned, we were still able to catch a large chunk of Sublime with Rome’s opening set. If they really did start playing at 6:30 like I thought they were, then they played a two-hour set and it should be billed as a co-headline gig. We arrived between 7 and 7:30 and they played tons of old Sublime hits with a few new tracks thrown in the mix. I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed hearing them perform all of these old Sublime songs. They too have a new CD out so we heard a few of their newer tracks as well.

Unity Tour

This tour is definitely worth catching if you are a fan of either band from any time period, but especially if you loved them both in the mid 90s. I will warn you that it was definitely a loud show, one that made me wish I had a pair of earplugs for myself. I will have to remember that for next time.