Casting Crowns at Break Forth 2013 Concert Review


Casting Crowns headlined Friday night at Break Forth 2013 here in Edmonton. It was a solid show that featured a lot of songs from their 2011 release, Come to the Well, and a new song that, honestly, I can't remember the name of, but I'm pretty sure it's from their new acoustic album. (Note: These are the kinds of highly researched and professional concert reviews that you've come to expect from me.) This was the third time I've seen Casting Crowns in concert in the last six or seven years, and the shows are essentially the same (in a good way): lead singer Mark Hall tells stories in between songs and encourages the crowd to yell "GLORY!" at points during songs. It's charming. But their songs are tremendous and the packed house sang along the entire night. And it was a fun show.

The only disappointing element was that Megan Garrett couldn't join the band for this show, due to the flu. This is the second Edmonton show in a row that she has missed - in 2011 at Break Forth, she had just had a baby. Entirely legitimate reasons, for sure. But I couldn't help but think that the song list for the show changed due to the band missing one of its two female vocalists.

The was the first Break Forth concert I've gone to where my wife and I made the conscious decision to NOT line up hours in advance for the rush seating. Instead, we arrived 30 minutes before show time, got to the end of the line that was (almost literally) three blocks away and (literally) had snaked across the street from Shaw Conference Centre. Sure, we were about 5,000 people back in the line, but considering the Break Forth organizers barely let us in before the scheduled 9 p.m. start and we didn't get to our seats until 9:20 - and Casting Crowns didn't get on stage until 10:10 - it made me very happy that we didn't show up at, say, 5 p.m. to stand in line for 4 hours to get a better seat. The back bleachers were just fine.

Speaking of the bleachers...

For me, the show was my first opportunity to put my new Panasonic ZS20 digital camera through the ropes, and I was quite impressed. The picture above was shot on full 20X optical zoom, using the High Sensitivity setting from my seat at the far end of the concert hall in the back bleachers.

Ditto for these two videos below. Enjoy!





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