Jimmy Eat World brought their 10^th Anniversary Futures tour to the small town of Stroudsburg, PA on Thursday.  This is a tour that if you missed it, you will be kicking yourself later.  Being billed as just a Jimmy Eat World show, I was surprised to see that there was an opening band for this tour and didn’t know what to expect.  In fact, I just thought it was going to be a local band from the area.  I was dead wrong.  Turned out to be a band from Arizona called Minibosses which features Jimmy Eat World’s keyboardist Robin Vining.  Minibosses isn’t your typical band though.  Their main drive is playing covers, mostly video game covers.  What I mean is, the music you heard while playing a 2-bit video game or Mario Brothers, Minibosses will play it, and they will play it very, very well.  What I mean to say is, it was amazing.  I couldn’t believe how spot on it was!  Not only did I want to go home and play video games, but I think the crowd also wanted to.  People were yelling requests and cheering non-stop.  It may have been a weird pairing for a tour like this, but it definitely got the crowd going for Jimmy Eat World.  Towards the end of their set Rich Burch and Zach Lind of Jimmy Eat World came out and helped cover Billy Joel’s “Moving Out (Anthony’s Song).  It was played flawlessly.  I was impressed with Minibosses, and found out they have covered Castlevania songs which I didn’t hear, but hopefully they come back over this area again and they will play one.  I must say Minibosses is a band you don’t want to miss if they are in your area.

http://www.minibosses.com/

The first part of Jimmy Eat World’s set was performing Futures front to back.  Not only is this a powerful album, but Jimmy Eat World played it without skipping a beat.  This was my fourth time seeing Jimmy Eat World and actually second time this year and I must say it was their best performance.  Not only was the performance perfect, but the lighting for the show fit the sound of the album.  I am never disappointed with Jimmy Eat World’s production in a live setting.  As always, when they played “23”, I got chills.  This song really does take shape when played live.  I hope they never take it out of their set.  After Futures, Jimmy Eat World came back on stage and did their first encore which featured a good portion of songs off their e.p. Stay On My Side Tonight.  Unlike when I saw them in the summer, this set had a lot of deep tracks being played.  Hearing songs off Stay on My Side Tonight live made me revisit that album and realize how good it is.  Seeing those songs played live made me think that Jimmy Eat World needs to incorporate these songs into their set going forward.  For their second encore, they played their more poppier songs and closed with “The Middle”.  As I said above, if you didn’t catch this tour, you missed out.  Jimmy Eat World really brought Futures to life and I’d go see that again.

http://jimmyeatworld.com/