Featured image: @kanexdoe
First impressions, eh? When Ghent quartet, Wrong Man, begin with a sustained shriek of feedback before kicking into a chugga-chugga riff, you’d expect them to force feed some no-nonsense hardcore straight into your ear canal. However, those barbed opening ten seconds soon melt away into something slower. Something swampier.
Bjorn Dossche’s parched vocals are what Tom Waits would’ve sounded like if he’d grown up digesting Failure and Unwound. Cedric Goetgebuer, meanwhile, leans his guitar into foot-on-monitor, classic rock territory, making for a clanking juxtaposition of styles on ‘Don’t Remind Me’ and ‘Wait’. The applause is polite rather than enthusiastic, but it’s a solid start.
Also making their Manchester debut, it’s wonderful that Mississippi four-piece MSPAINT still haven’t had a cease-and-desist email from Bill Gates. Even if they did, you suspect they’d change their name to Adobe Photoshop or iMac for yet more corporation baiting japes.
They’re fronted by DeeDee, a mountainous presence in fishnet sleeves who patrols the stage like a sentient tree trunk. He taunts his knee ligaments with gravity defying leaps and subsequent heavy landings, while spitting hyper speed rants as the band carve through most of their Post-American album.
The one-two combo of ‘Acid’ and ‘Hardwired’ is an untoppable twin peak, riding along on Nick Panella’s squelching synth and Randy Riley’s fuzzed-out bass. “FULL ENGLISH BREKKY GOES CRAZY” they posted on Twitter hours after arriving in the country, and to be fair, so do MSPAINT.
Fiddlehead’s songs never outstay their welcome. Over three albums, which have fused into an unintended triptych on grief and loss, just three tracks exceed the three-minute mark. This brevity means there isn’t an ounce of fat in their tunes; no wasted syllables, no superfluous solos and absolutely no messing about.
Still, it takes a brave band to open with two songs from their new album. But from the moment Patrick Flynn bellows “Life is everything” at the start of ‘The Deathlife’, the group and diehards mesh as one. An unbroken supply of stage divers cartwheel onto outstretched arms, the occasional lost cap or shoe disappearing into the pulsing throng. Flynn’s reflexes keep his head marginally out of harm’s way, while the rest of the quintet take sanctuary towards the back of the stage. Shawn Costa, with his impregnable castle of drums and cymbals, has the safest seat in the house.
Despite a few extra grains of salt in the pepper pot these days, the band never eases off. From ‘Sullenboy’ and ‘True Hardcore (II)’, to ‘The Woes’ and ‘Widow in the Sunlight’, it’s a relentless barrage of earworms. There’s no let-up for the faithful, either, whose perpetual motion could generate enough electricity to power a small country – Andorra or Tuvalu, perhaps – for a week. Expand this sustainable punk energy to a stadium show and we’d never need to burn coal again.
The mic lead vanishes during ‘Lay Low’, prompting Flynn to conduct a mass karaoke session while the band plays on. He then dedicates the encore of ‘Heart to Heart’ to his young son back in Boston, welling up in the process, it’s this maturity that separates Fiddlehead from the pack. It’d be impossible to write this music without profound interventions from life and death, and that comes from having a few miles on the clock.
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