High-powered rock on tour

12 Stones is among a five-band lineup Sunday in Adrian.

See Spot Rock. Hear Spot Rap, Thrash, and Crunch. Listen to Spot Give Positive Messages.

The 2004 See Spot Rock Tour, which comes to Adrian on Sunday night, offers a five-band lineup of Christian rock and hiphop that is heavy on music and relevancy and light on preachiness.

"We're technically not a Christian band," said Paul McCoy, lead singer of 12 Stones. "We try to be positive and have good values. But there's really no limitations to what we write. We just write and play what we know and what we feel."

The same positivity, built on a Christian foundation, applies to the rest of See Spot Rock's lineup of Grits, Skillet, Pillar, and Big Dismal, all top Christian groups with mainstream appeal.

12 Stone's McCoy, guitarist Eric Weaver, bassist Kevin Dorr, and drummer Aaron Gainer hail from the rural town of Mandeville, La. "It's a great area for zydeco and blues, but for rock music it's nothing but cover bands, at least it was when we were starting out," McCoy said in an interview this week.

The group - named after a verse in the Old Testament book of Joshua - had only played about a dozen live gigs when its demo disc landed the band an audition in New York City, which soon led to a contract with Wind-Up Records.

Grits is a rap duo from Jacksonville, Fla., that has released four discs on the Gotee Records label. The pair known as Coffee (Stacey Jones) and Bonafide (Teron Carter) experienced a breakthrough in 1999 when their album "Grammatical Revolution" landed on numerous mainstream rap charts and put them into the video rotations of MTV and BET music channels.

Pillar is a hard-hitting modern rock group from Kansas known for such guitar-powered tunes as Fireproof" and "Epidemic."

Skillet, which records for Ardent Records, is another guitar-powered rock group whose hits include "My Obsession" and "Energy," while Tallahassee's up-and-coming Big Dismal offers a mix of massive guitars and songs of hope on its Wind-Up Records' debut, "Believe."

The See Spot Rock Tour comes to the Merillat Center at Adrian College, 110 South Madison Ave., Adrian, at 6 p.m. Sunday (doors open at 5). Tickets are $14 in advance, available at local Christian bookstores and by phone at 517-263-7995, or $18 at the door.

Contact David Yonke at:

dyonke@theblade.com

or 419-724-6154.