COIN performs at the Newport Music Hall on Feb. 15. Source: Abhigyaan Bararia| Lantern
Reporter
Imagine a rave. Now subtract the electronic music element and replace it with music of the indie pop genre instead. Keep the extravagant lighting, the screaming and jumping audience, and the (extremely) high-energy atmosphere, and that perfectly sums up COIN delivered to the city of Columbus on Friday night.
The show started with Tessa Violet performing to warm the audience up. She brought so much energy to the venue and immediately got the crowd all riled up and ready to go. I had not heard of her before seeing her but she left me a fan.
By her second song, “Polarize” by Twenty One Pilots, she had managed to get the audience vibing to her music and singing along to her version of the song, which was full of energy and passion.
During her set, Violet went on to talk about her struggles with anxiety and mental health as a whole, and said how counseling helped her become who she is and encouraged people struggling with mental health issues to seek help. This was all as a prelude to her song “Bad Ideas,” which slowed the pace down with a beautiful and clean acoustic sound.
She was the perfect opening act for COIN, fitting the genre and appealing to the demographic present.
COIN entered onto the stage as nothing but mere silhouettes, with the smoke machine going full-pelt. Not a word was exchanged with the crowd as the band immediately went into their first song, “I Don’t Wanna Dance” which got the crowd going.
Transitioning immediately into “Simple Romance,” COIN kept the tempo going with their most recent song, which, to no surprise, everyone in the audience sang along to.
COIN performed with their fill in (potentially permanent) bassist Matt Martin, as their usual bassist quit the band to focus on production/engineering for other artists. It was something I was looking forward to see as I had not heard him previously playing with the rest of the members.
He fit in well with the general chemistry of the band and took nothing away from the performance.
The band then changed the pace with a stripped version of “I Would,” which featured just the lead guitarist Joe Memmel and lead vocalist Chase Lawrence. The song was poles apart from all the high-energy songs the band was performing before, and it came as a welcome switch.
Lawrence’s voice really shined in this song along with his synthesizer, backed up by Memmel’s clean strumming and sustains, with both sounds harmonizing seamlessly.
The pace was swiftly picked up again with “Hannah” and “Run”, with the crowd getting back to their dancing and screaming their lungs out with the song lyrics. You could feel the passion flowing through the band and with each song.
“Run” saw Lawrence doing a lot more of his dancing and moving around the stage and not singing too much, as the crowd knew each word and sang it out loud with perfect cohesion.
The choppy guitar riffs along with the deep and fast paced drum and bass combo kept the show fast paced and energetic, which worked out well for everyone as the band was feeding off of the energy of its crowd.
Although there was not a lot of dialogue exchanged between the band and the crowd, you could feel the connection between the two entities through the music. You could see the passion inside each member of the band, and it was translated to the audience, who belted out each song with as much vigor as the last one.
The band played “Malibu” near the end of their set, which was received with a lot of enthusiasm. The lights behind the band lit up in very temperate and warm colors, projecting a visual of Malibu the city inside everyone’s minds. The orange, yellow and green immediately took my mind to a place with beautiful sunsets and palm trees.
The audience screamed out the line “Your parents’ house in Ohio,” which was something I was expecting and looking forward to from the start of the concert, and the crowd didn’t let me down.
Besides the songs, there were a lot of other things that made the concert a wonderful experience. The production of the entire event, the sound quality of the equipment and the acoustics of the venue, the highly responsive and interactive audience and especially the lights.
The lights behind the stage really made the show what it was, a complete spectacle.
Overall, COIN showcased pure passion with each of their songs, providing the audience with a night to remember, and leaving everything that they had on the stage.
