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After hopping around the UK with Feeder last week, GIRLBAND! are back out on the road with Taking Back Sunday for a whistle-stop three-date UK tour. This was always going to be a tougher crowd, an ill-fit for their breezy nuggets, and so it proves for the first half of the set. Blank faces and muted applause meet the “na-na-naaa”s of ‘21st Century Suffragette’, while the invite for the early birds to test out the Ritz’s rubber-springed dance floor goes ignored. At the balcony, chins rest on palms.
It’s a shame. ‘Say Something’ has a chorus that would raise interested eyebrows at Haim HQ and raises their stock in time for closer, ‘Not Like the Rest’. “I hope you sing along,” Georgie says with a pensive chuckle, teeing up a set-piece that could go horribly wrong. Yet sing they do. A relief all round.
“We’re gonna play a lot of songs from the new album,” says Taking Back Sunday frontman, Adam Lazzara, styling out any trepidation from the safety of his trim burgundy suit. “Thank you in advance for your patience.”
Their latest LP, 152, has split the room. The band knows it. The sold-out room does, too. Glazed with a pop sheen by producer, Tushar Apte, it’s not the betrayal of their roots as some would have you believe, but there’s nothing on there that would make it onto a ‘best of’ album. Thankfully, live, Mark O’Connell’s drums let out a satisfying thump on ‘The One’, ‘Keep Going’ and opener ‘S’old’, rather than the tinny typewriter clicks that blight their recorded equivalents.
In truth, Taking Back Sunday could dine out on their irreproachable first three albums until the sun swallows the earth, even if it takes a handful of usually bankable tunes to hit their stride tonight. Lazzara, a chimera of class clown, giddy labradoodle and Butlins redcoat, pirouettes, hip-shakes and skates around the stage between flawless mic catches. However, syrupy hair-metal ballad, ‘Amphetamine Smiles’, in which he straps on an acoustic guitar for the only time during the evening, springs the bar staff into action.
Anthemic barely covers ‘Error: Operator’, ‘You’re So Last Summer’ and ‘Timberwolves at New Jersey’, though. The devastating hooks continue to pile high. ‘Cute Without the ‘E’’ and ‘MakeDamnSure’ bring the night to a joyous end, with classic choruses of a functionally dead genre hitting home. If nu-metal can make a comeback, then post-hardcore – now co-opted, bastardised and subsumed into the wagging tail of twinkly fifth-wave emo – is due the kiss of life, too.
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