Concert Review: Jeris Johnson, Butcher Babies, Eva Under Fire and LYLVC at Eastside Bowl’s, The 58!

There are definitely a few prerequisites for a memorable rock show: good bands, a crowd willing to sweat for it, and a room that doesn’t just hold sound but weaponizes it. 

That’s exactly what unfolded February 22nd at Eastside Bowl’s new room, The 58, a 225-capacity echo chamber named after the exact gold paint mixture from the 1958 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop, specially granted to the venue by Gibson. Not a metaphor. The real thing.

Walking in, the walls carried that unmistakable Les Paul glow. It feels like someone compressed a main stage and declined to adjust the decibel level.

Stack a bill featuring The Butcher Babies and Eva Under Fire inside a space that holds fewer people than a modest wedding reception and you don’t get “intimate.” You get volatile.

I’ve seen both bands multiple times in rooms massive by comparison. Big stages. Towering rigs. Festival fields where the barricade looks like a distant memory. Seeing them here felt borderline unfair, and we were the ones benefiting.

Opening the night were North Carolina Nu-Metal disruptors LYLVC. If you haven’t caught them yet, they don’t do subtle. Their hybrid attack, rap cadences colliding with jagged guitars and electronic textures, immediately erased any lingering “it’s early” energy in the room. The dual-vocal dynamic hits hard live. It’s chaotic melodic and aggressive without losing control.

Visually? Absolute gold.

My camera was locked in with co-vocalists Alyse Zavala and Oscar Romero most of the set. Zavala commands space with this sharp, kinetic intensity that translates brutally well through a lens. Romero brings a different voltage, coiled and explosive, snapping between rap precision and rock aggression without warning. 

Some of the most intense shots I’ve captured in recent shows came out of that set. LYLVC is flat out amazing live. They also understand how to exist on stage in a way that makes a photographer quietly grateful.

In a venue this size, you don’t passively observe a band like LYLVC. You absorb them. Every bass drop lands directly in your chest. Every vocal line feels like it’s aimed at you specifically. They didn’t warm up the crowd. They pushed it down a flight of stairs and told it to get the hell up. 

Eva Under Fire shifted the tone without sacrificing intensity. Detroit grit is real and it’s baked into their DNA. Where LYLVC thrived on volatility, Eva Under Fire delivered muscle and melody in equal measure. 

Clean vocals soared without losing edge, and the band was undeniable. Songs built for big rooms somehow felt even more powerful here, compressed into a golden box where there was no place for sound to hide.

They never cease to amaze me. I’ve seen them multiple times and somehow, they keep sharpening the blade. There’s no autopilot. No phoned-in moments. Just the consistency that accompanies growth. 

There’s nothing like hearing anthemic choruses in a 225-cap room that makes them hit differently. It’s less spectacle, more connection. You could see faces in the crowd singing every word back. Not a sea of phone screens, actual faces. Eva Under Fire didn’t just perform. They locked in. In The 58, lock-in means eye contact, sweat, and zero buffer zone.

Then came The Butcher Babies...

Arena-caliber aggression in a room this size borders on reckless. From the first note, it went off. Riffs tore through the air with surgical sharpness. Drums cracked like gunfire. The low end felt less like audio and more like an infrastructure stress test.

Heidi Shepherd, better known to most as Heidi the Butcher has command over a crowd. She doesn’t perform for you; she drags you into it.

She stalks the stage, lunging into the crowd’s energy, and shifted from controlled menace to full-throttle chaos in seconds. There is nowhere to hide from her presence. When she locks eyes with the front row, it’s game over.

From a concert photographer’s perspective, she is an absolute nuisance. I mean that with love and respect. Constant motion. Hair flying. Microphone swinging. Zero predictable patterns. No photo pit. No buffer. Just being crammed shoulder to shoulder, trying to keep her in frame while she refuses to stay in one place for more than half a heartbeat. 

It was a rush. Pure adrenaline. Timing had to be perfect. There was no sanctuary, either react or miss it.

 When you nail the shot, it feels earned. I’ve seen Butcher Babies on stages massive enough to require video screens for facial expressions. Here, there was nowhere to escape the force of it. Every scream, every snarl, every stomp landed unfiltered. The band fed off the proximity. The crowd fed off the band. It was less “concert,” more controlled riot with a lighting rig. 

What makes them so effective live is precision. It’s easy to mistake chaos for intensity. This was calculated vocal violence with tight transitions, deliberate pacing, and just enough breathing room to let the next punch hurt more. 

Closing the night was Jeris Johnson, and if there were any doubts about the lineup’s range, he erased them quickly. Johnson leans into modern rock with a genre-bending edge, metal influence paired with pop instincts, and a stage presence that feels both self-aware and unaware simultaneously. 

By the time he hit the stage, the room was fully cooked. Johnson capitalized on it. Big hooks. Big energy. No hesitation. His set felt like the bridge between traditional heavy rock and whatever the next mutation looks like. Confident, loud, unapologetically forward-facing.

What made the entire night borderline absurd wasn’t just the quality of the bands. It was the scale mismatch. Acts that regularly command sprawling stages were now operating within arm’s reach. You could study pedalboards. You could see expressions shift between songs. You could feel air move when amps kicked in.

The 58 earned its name visually, sure. It earned its reputation sonically on this night as well. The room didn’t swallow the sound. It sharpened it. It didn’t distance the crowd. It forced engagement. There’s no hiding in a space like this, not for the audience, not for the artists.

All four bands delivered. No weak links. No awkward lulls. 

Seeing LYLVC ignite the fuse, Eva Under Fire drive it deeper, Butcher Babies set it off, and Jeris Johnson close it out felt like a flex. 

A reminder that big-stage bands don’t need big stages to dominate.