Adema or A Demise?

It is not often you see a car wreck occur right before your eyes, and when it does happen it is not something you will quickly forget. This occurred to me on Saturday night when I attended the Adema concert at Webster Theater in West Hartford, Connecticut.  While luckily I was not a part of any car crashes I did see a band crash and burn onstage in their moment of glory. Adema who is a nu-metal band from California, was supposed to be on their five piece original member reunion tour. However due to very unfortunate circumstances, on Saturday night only two of the members were left on stage. To say it was the worst reunion show I ever witnessed, would be an understatement. The original guitarist left Adema to join another band before the tour started then the lead vocalist unexplainably left mid-tour. The saying goes fool me once shame on me, fool me twice shame on you, apparently Adema never received this memo, because this is the second time the guitarist and lead singer ditched the band to go their own ways. In fact, Adema had their new guitarist and lead singer step down before the tour to put the reunion show on for the fans. Sadly, the core members of Adema made a terrible mistake, as only one guitarist, the bassist and drummer, the members who were in the band the entire time were left to perform on this “reunion “tour. However, the tour must go on and Adema decided to continue touring as a three piece with the guitarist and bassist both handling vocal duties. This seemed like a good plan, until the Hartford police arrested the bassist during the band’s sound check for public intoxication. Things could not be going any worse, since a bassist is vital for a band especially a three piece. Still the show must go on and Adema made the wonderful decision of letting their Dungeons and Dragons obese bus driver handle bass duties. Normally, I love to root for the underdog, but this guy was pathetic. He was about as un-rock and roll as you can get. His bass playing consisted of strumming the open E string and after every song he made a comment. At one point, he kept rambling on and the guitarist just stared at him with his mouth wide open and a look of disgust upon his face.  If was not wearing a “Fuck Me I’m Fat” shirt I might not have even watched the band perform, and would have went to talk to the opening band outside. In fact, when Adema first took the stage they sounded so different I did not realize it was them until the third song of their set when they played one of their hit songs “Giving In.” In fact, I first thought they ran out of songs to play and were just stealing Adema’s songs. Another reason I did not realize the band was Adema was because the floor only had twenty-five people on it. I know because I actually counted. Never in my life had I seen something so sad and pathetic at a rock concert, that I cannot blame Adema for having a very short set list. If my memory serves me correct, I believe they only played seven songs. Their time on stage was shorter than the opening bands time performing as they took stage at exactly 9:30pm and I was in my car at 10:05pm. To make matters worse, they did not even perform the one and only song I really liked from them, “Immortal.” If they played that song, I would have went home happy as a calm and this review would have been a lot nicer. However, the song was not played but at least I got to witness history as the guitarist claimed  this would be the last show on the tour and possibly forever. It was by far not the best concert I ever attended but I never will forget it, since it was the demise of Adema.