Des Rocs — Skully’s Music Diner, Columbus, Ohio
Music criticism has a well-documented access problem. Say the wrong thing about the wrong artist and the press credentials dry up. The result is a landscape of reviews that read like endorsements — enthusiastic, safe, and interchangeable. It is worth stating upfront, then, that what happened at Skully’s Music Diner on Friday night was genuinely worth the space it takes to describe, and that the argument made here is not one of obligation.
King Falcon opened the night — this reviewer arrived in time for ROMES. Two brothers, one handling guitar and keys, the other on drums, whose set carried the industrial tension of early Nine Inch Nails without mimicking it. They have their own voice, and Friday night they used it to hold a room that had already packed in.
The dominant live aesthetic in popular music trends toward the polished and the passive — synth-pop and its adjacent genres engineered for a phone screen rather than a room full of people. The artists setting that standard are not building on what came before them. Anyone who has stood in front of bands like The Struts, Palaye Royale, Reignwolf, Cage the Elephant or Pink knows what full physical and emotional commitment to a live performance looks like. That bar exists. The generation currently filling venues behind it is mostly not clearing it — showing up, presenting their music, and calling it a show. What is missing is not talent. It is the willingness to treat a live performance as something that demands more than presence.
Des Rocs demands more. Daniel Rocco walked out with his curly pompadour and matching leather jacket and pants — hair and clothing together signaling a rock aesthetic that felt considered from the first step onto the stage. He opened with “This Land” and shed the coat after the first song. The pompadour held on for longer, losing its shape gradually as the set wore on and Rocco’s physical investment in the performance took over. By the end of the night it was simply hair, and that felt right — the aesthetic giving way to the work underneath it.
Start with the music, because it earns everything else. Rocco writes songs with genuine melodic ambition — choruses that function as arguments, verses that set them up rather than stall them. “The Juice,” “Never Ending Moment,” and “Dream Machine” are the kind of tracks that arrive fully formed, the kind that make a crowd sing back without being prompted. Will Tully and Eric Mendelsohn anchor the rhythm section with the ease of people who stopped needing to communicate about it years ago. A look exchanged between them during “Hanging by a Thread” was the closest thing to conversation they needed all night.
Pass that first test and Rocco delivers the rest of the package in full. At one point he plays a custom Aviator guitar known as the “Rocket”, another piece to his aesthetic behind his back — not as a flourish but as the natural conclusion of where a moment took him. He reads the front row and responds to it. He grins mid-riff at something coming back from the crowd, clamps his eyes shut at a lyric that costs something, laughs openly at an exchange with an individual raising their arms in the crowd. His face runs a full vocabulary across the set, and none of it is managed. A performer this physically committed to the room makes the room feel it.
“Used to the Darkness” and “Born to Lose” hit with the full weight of a band locked in. “This Is Our Life” became a room-wide event. The acoustic turn on “Maybe, I” brought everything to a standstill — Rocco’s voice alone against a crowd that held its breath, then exhaled together when the band came back in. “I Am the Lightning” and “HVY MTL DRMR” drove the final stretch before “Let Me Live / Let Me Die” closed the night — a song approaching 50 million streams that still sounds most at home in a club, in front of people who came specifically for it.
That is the point. The show at Skully’s worked because Rocco has not optimized the humanity out of what he does. He treats a live performance as a two-way transaction — he brings everything, and he expects the room to meet him. The music justifies the attention. The performance justifies the room. In 2026, that combination is rarer than it should be.
ROMES photos
DES ROCS photos
DES ROCS
desrocs.com | Facebook | X.com
ROMES
romesmusic.com | Facebook
SKULLY’S MUSIC DINER
skullys.org | Facebook | X.com
Written and photographed by Harry Acosta (harryacosta.com)
Harry Acosta is a professional photographer who started out shooting concerts. He is an avid concertgoer and loves to capture his favorite musicians and unseen moments we take for granted in everyday life.
