On a cold and chilly October night, The Keystones warmed up Ames with their hard rock songs, making everyone get up and move.
The Keystones, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, performed Friday night at the Memorial Union Maintenance Shop, along with openers Jordan Mayland and King Wylde.
The first performer and opener was Rudy Miller, also known as King Wylde. Miller played quite a few love songs that all had a strong emotional power to them. After the performance, he talked about what it was like making music about that feeling.
“All of them come from different sources, usually it is an emotional outlet,” Miller said. “We feel powerful emotions and I express that through my music… every one of those songs is a difficult moment in my life and I want other people to feel it. Because if I feel it, other people feel it.”
Mayland performed second and had quite a unique variety of songs. The first couple of his songs were acoustic guitar and harmonica. He then switched to a keyboard and did more synth-heavy music.
After Mayland, the main event started. The lead singer of The Keystones did a few solo songs to get warmed up before the rest of the band joined him on stage.
As someone who had never heard of The Keystones before the start of the week, it was hard to have an idea of what to expect. They absolutely rocked the night.
More heavy rock than alternative rock, every member of the band had their own moment to shine. Every song that was selected seemed cherry-picked to show off each of their strengths and as the concert continued, the crowd got more and more energized.
One of the best examples of this is when they played Rage Against The Machines’ “Killing in the Name,” which has an iconic drum section. This brought the house down and got the venue moving.
After the concert, Jack Sherman (vocalist and guitar), Matt Sherman (vocalist and bass) and Eddie Curran (drums) from The Keystones answered some questions.
“We all mutually love Queens of the Stone Age, The Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, lately it has been more hard rock Royal Blood, Dead Poet Society,” Jack Sherman said. “We like a lot of that hard rock and modern rock stuff.”
The process of forming the band is, just like the members themselves, both cool and unique.
“It started, Matt and I had taken guitar lessons and things, for years before performing,” Jack Sherman said. “It wasn’t until we were starting college, we had went on a trip to Italy. It was so fun, interesting and different, and we felt a fatigue about what we were doing. We wanted to do something fun and exciting that neither of us knew anything about, so we started the band.”
The band shared a story about how they came up with the name.
“We were trying to think of a name and just couldn’t,” Matt Sherman said. “I had this little prop camera, just messing around with it and I looked down and it said, ‘Keystone something,’ and I was like, ‘Hey what about The Keystones?’ And everyone thought it was pretty good, that was it.”
The Keystones are currently on their 2024 EP release tour. Find out more about the band from their Instagram page.
