The rain. It’s been a thing this festival season, hasn’t it? But even with that said, Chicago Open Air Presents, which hasn’t seen a line up since 2017, pushed on through for their long awaiting festival fans who came to rock – rain or shine! And I’ll tell you: even with the rain, loyal fans pushed through those gates once those doors opened and ran towards that one main stage at the Seat Geek Stadium like it was the most anticipated event of their year. It was sad to see early bands like Vein and Code Orange get canceled by rain and the later start, but the safety of the fans has to come first. It was awesome to see the stage relive its previous year’s glory with the sound of pure rock that could only come from some of the heaviest hitting metal/rock bands around. And the music did fly high above those storm clouds when Beartooth hit the stage that first day. Well-known Swedish bands like Meshuggah and a very artistic and melodic metal performance by Ghost was next, followed by long-awaited headliners System of A Down. SOAD had everyone, myself included, singing along to classics like ‘Aerials’, ‘B.Y.O.B’ amongst their thirty song setlist, and I’m pretty sure that by when they closed out with ‘Toxicity’ we were all out of breath and losing our vocal cords. Eh, it was worth it.
