The last time I personally saw Three Days Grace live in concert was 18 years ago at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver.
They were one of those early 2000s bands I definitely listened to on the radio and enjoyed, but like many music acts in that time period, music trends slowly changed and they disappeared from my radar. I had no idea that singer Adam Gontier had left the band in 2013 and was replaced by Matt Walst, only to return in 2024 to co-lead with Walst.
Three Days Grace clearly stayed on the radar of a massive amount of rock fans. More than 5500 people packed Victoria’s Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre for their show on a Sunday night. It felt like half the audience was wearing band merch. An autographed tour poster that cost $150 sold out.
The demographics of fans was way more diverse than I expected. I figured a hard rock band like this would mostly have middle-aged guys like me, but I saw a lot of kids, women and seniors walking the concourse.
Sunday’s show as the launching point for Three Days Grace’s 13-date Canadian tour in support of their latest album ‘Alienation’ and was the first time the band had performed at Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre since 2009.
They kicked off the show with ‘Dominate’, the first track off of ‘Alienation’. One thing I noticed from the photo pit was that both Adam Gontier and Matt Walst seemed to be performing to a vocal backtrack. I found this a little surprising, but at the same time, Gavin Rossdale of Bush did the same thing last April. The show wasn’t all lip-syncing, but it was used a various points.
The set was split into three acts. The first act featured 12 songs that featured some of their hits like ‘Animal I Have Become’ and ‘Pain’. They also performed their latest single ‘Kill Me Fast’ directly before their oldest single, their breakout hit ‘I Have Everything About You’.
The second act was a three acoustic songs after a video of a friend of the band named Christian telling a story about moving to Norwood, Ontario about growing up with the members of Three Days Grace before the band made it big and just gathering around a bonfire with cheap guitars and starry skies.
“Tonight isn’t about looking back,” said Christian in the video. “It’s about stripping down to how it began. To the feeling, back to the fire and starry sky. Back to the roots.”
The band then surrounded a faux campfire on stage sitting on logs and friends sitting on lawn chairs with the video screen depicting a forest backdrop with a sky full of stars as they performed ‘Lost in You’, a medley of ‘Chalk Outline, ‘Porn Star Dancing’ and ‘My Sharona’ and closed the acoustic portion with ‘Lifetime.’
As the campsite setting was taken off stage before the third act, Gontier sang the chorus of The Tragically Hip’s ‘Ahead by a Century’ acapella. Walst then told the audience, “Let’s get this f***ing party started. I want to see those devil horns in the air. Get those mosh pits going!” They then launched into ‘I Am Machine’.
It wasn’t the only time Walst encouraged the crowd in the GA section to start mosh pits. He also tried to get people start crowd surfing. It’s at those points where I was reminded I guess a lot of us are old now. While two circle pits opened up at one point and a couple individuals briefly crowd surfed, it was a rather tame in comparison to concerts of my youth. Most people in GA seemed content with just politely rocking out rather than the sweaty, chaotic crush that would happen back in the day.
The final section of the set consisted of seven songs closing out with two of their big hits in ‘Never Too Late’ and ‘Riot’.
Opening the night was Edmonton’s Royal Tusk. The band announced to the Victoria audience that was still filing into the venue that this was their first-ever arena tour. Royal Tusk has performed in Victoria a few times including a show last year at Capital Ballroom, but I hadn’t seen them since Rock The Shores a decade ago. They performed a short 30 minute set that I wish had been a bit longer.
The middle act was Burlington, Ontario’s Finger Eleven. They performed a 50-minute set that included their megahits ‘Paralyzer’ and ‘One Thing’, singles ‘Above’, ‘First Time’ and ‘Good Times’ and music off their new album.
“So Victoria, there’s big news in our world,” Finger Eleven frontman Scott Anderson told the audience. “We finally got off our ass and made a new record. They say it couldn’t be done. But ten years was all we needed.”
Guitarist Rick Jackett was the one to watch on stage during their set. From multiple hair flips to spinning his guitar around his neck at one point, he was going wild out there while seemingly not missing a chord.
