Fans brave heat for diverse Warped Tour

It was like a blanket party for hope on a griddle-hot hotel parking lot, except when the self-professed originator of post-punk laptop rap was cheerily dropping rhymes about anti-trancedentalist poets.

At a bit past 2 p.m. Thursday afternoon outside the Plaza downtown, where the annual punk rock summer camp known as the Warped Tour returned to Vegas for the first time since 2004, Boston's The Acacia Strain grimaced and convulsed through death metal-influenced hardcore reflective of the kind of ill temperament and lack of impulse control that normally results in court-mandated anger management sessions.

"For those of you who aren't familiar with us, we are a very negative band. I am a miserable human being," singer Vincent Bennett snarled between blasts of obsidian-black catharsis, where three guitarists created a dense, swarming wall of turgid riffs. "We are the dark cloud hanging above the Warped Tour."

Then Bennett encouraged mosh pit violence and commanded the crowd to extend their middle fingers in his direction.

They eagerly obliged.

Simultaneously on another stage, The Acacia Strain's inverse in terms of disposition, geeky, good-humored rapper MC Lars (Andrew Nielsen), was enjoining the crowd to dance without attempting to bloody one another's faces.

"Come on babies, let's have some fun," chirped Nielsen, a former English major at Stanford who at one point rhymed about Edgar Allan Poe.

"Nineteenth century lit is very punk rock," he noted.

This, in a nutshell, is a tour that can't really be squeezed into a nutshell anymore.

Warped continues to feature plenty of punk acts, which this year ranged from the gruff, blue-collar Street Dogs, whose set included harmonica-fired, gravel-throated nods to their rhythm guitarist's drinking problem, to dandily dressed teenage brothers The Bots, who wore collared shirts and ties despite the heat and bashed out hard and hooky odes to self-determination that belied their youthfulness.

The most formidable act of this ilk, Against Me!, practically combusted onstage, all twitching muscles and perpetual motion as they played rebel yells like "I Was A Teenage Anarchist," which questioned youthful idealism while at the same time seeming to be propelled by it.

"Do you remember when you were young and wanted to set the world on fire?" singer/guitarist Tom Gabel asked in the song, and it was a sentiment that didn't seem to have been forgotten.

But Warped has long encompassed many genres other than its initial punk focal point -- metal, pop, hip-hop, reggae, electronica, to name a few -- and this year may have been the tour's most diverse yet.

There was Memphis country rock whiskey chuggers Lucero, whose members had gray in their beards and who played raucous, lapsteel-inflected drinking songs to a crowd generally not old enough to drink (the average age of the Warped attendee is just under 18, according to tour founder Kevin Lyman).

Electro party pop duo 3oh!3, performing with a backing band, somehow merged Auto-Tune vocals, snippets of the Scorpions' "Rock You Like A Hurricane" and robot dancing into one of the more fun, freewheeling performances of the day, rivaled only perhaps by Foxy Shazam's Queen-inspired pop pelvic thrusts, which were brought to loud sweaty life by frontman Eric Sean Nally, who did handstands onstage and chomped up a lit cigarette.

The offerings offstage were just as eclectic as what could be found on them, as Warped is a sort of punk flea market where you can purchase an "I Love Boobies" T-shirt or a marijuana leaf-spangled light, sign up for the Marines or score a "Who Would Jesus Bomb?" bumper sticker, drink the free water available or pound $8 cans of Fosters lager until your insides became as dry as the desert air.

More hard choices had to be made when it came time to choose what bands to see at a given moment, as music was played simultaneously from a multitude of stages from noon to 9 p.m.

One of the best moments of the day, however, took place not onstage but in front of Larry and the Flask's merch booth, where the bearded band of Zach Galifianakis stunt doubles played inches from an ever-growing circle of fans who clapped along boisterously to the group's raw-lunged folk firebombs.

Punk rock always was supposed to be about levelling the barrier between the artist and the audience, right?

Guess this was still a punk rock tour after all.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.