My Chemical Romance, EveryTimeIDie, Drive By Novemeber 3 Brixton Academy
My friend Paul had a plus one for the Brixton Academy, so being a mad ETID fan (and not averse to a bit of MCR) I tagged along.
Drive by:
Four piece from New Jersey. Hampered by a muddy mix and lackluster stage presence.
Very radio friendly. Showed strange occaisional echoes of early U2 mixed up in the usual US College Boy Indie Rock.
They looked good but the performance was a little ragged round the edges when it should have been tight.
The closest comparison I could make was that of a young Jimmy Eat World without the intensity.
At the end of their set, Paul turned to me and said 'That was pretty much the same song for half an hour.'
I cracked up, because it was damn near true.
Time passed and the Academy filled some more (Paul and I had bypassed the queue running around the block and then down the street by virtue of his guest pass).
EveryTimeIDie took the stage and ripped out forty minutes of rockin' noise-core with their signature swing. Their set drew heavily on the recent album Gutter Phenomenon, but a few earlier classics were thrown out to the kids, notably The Logic of Crocodiles. Some of the subtleties were lost in the echoey mix, but the energy and confidence could not be damped.
Keith Buckley is in danger of being a born rock god, and his cohorts are not far behind. Lots of swinging riffs, Marshall Stack Climbing, stage side swapping and as Paul put it: a surprising amount of Headbanging and Posing.
Put simply, they rocked. Any other band in front of any other crowd would have been blown off the stage.
But from the first moment that My Chemical Romance appeared (one by one, in front of a dark curtain that dropped to reveal a ten foot drum riser) it was obvious that Gerard Way and his darklings had the crowd in the palm of their hands.
Seriously. When he said scream the crowd screamed louder than I have heard anyone scream before. When he sang, the crowd sang along, chiming in at the right times.
Gerard was dressed in the manner of a protestant priest: black trousers, black jacket and a black shirt with the white tonsular collar. The costume took on a strange resonance as the show progressed, the crowd reacting more and more like the ecstatic congregation of a pentacostal ministry, and Gerard working the crowd like a Southern Baptist preacher, bringing them higher and higher. Raise your hands to heaven. Shout Hello Grandma. Step back, someone has fallen down. Scream, Brixton.
To be fair, the set did include a hell of a lot of filler. Long intros, spiels between songs and the like.
But the kids didn't care. They sang, they danced, the whole band gave it their all. Frank Iero spun out of control.
Two Stained-Glass shaped screens that flanked the drum riser projected a mixture of religious images and psychadaelic swirls.
The band played a set that drew on both their albums, plus a new song that sounded strangely like Last Christmas by George Michael.
I have seen better performances by better bands.
But the crowd, all of them in black and red, some sporting Nightmare Before Christmas patches, many of them young enough for their parents to be waiting outside at the end, some so young that their parents accompanied them inside the hall, they loved it.
For them, it was little short of a religious experience.
Drive by:
Four piece from New Jersey. Hampered by a muddy mix and lackluster stage presence.
Very radio friendly. Showed strange occaisional echoes of early U2 mixed up in the usual US College Boy Indie Rock.
They looked good but the performance was a little ragged round the edges when it should have been tight.
The closest comparison I could make was that of a young Jimmy Eat World without the intensity.
At the end of their set, Paul turned to me and said 'That was pretty much the same song for half an hour.'
I cracked up, because it was damn near true.
Time passed and the Academy filled some more (Paul and I had bypassed the queue running around the block and then down the street by virtue of his guest pass).
EveryTimeIDie took the stage and ripped out forty minutes of rockin' noise-core with their signature swing. Their set drew heavily on the recent album Gutter Phenomenon, but a few earlier classics were thrown out to the kids, notably The Logic of Crocodiles. Some of the subtleties were lost in the echoey mix, but the energy and confidence could not be damped.
Keith Buckley is in danger of being a born rock god, and his cohorts are not far behind. Lots of swinging riffs, Marshall Stack Climbing, stage side swapping and as Paul put it: a surprising amount of Headbanging and Posing.
Put simply, they rocked. Any other band in front of any other crowd would have been blown off the stage.
But from the first moment that My Chemical Romance appeared (one by one, in front of a dark curtain that dropped to reveal a ten foot drum riser) it was obvious that Gerard Way and his darklings had the crowd in the palm of their hands.
Seriously. When he said scream the crowd screamed louder than I have heard anyone scream before. When he sang, the crowd sang along, chiming in at the right times.
Gerard was dressed in the manner of a protestant priest: black trousers, black jacket and a black shirt with the white tonsular collar. The costume took on a strange resonance as the show progressed, the crowd reacting more and more like the ecstatic congregation of a pentacostal ministry, and Gerard working the crowd like a Southern Baptist preacher, bringing them higher and higher. Raise your hands to heaven. Shout Hello Grandma. Step back, someone has fallen down. Scream, Brixton.
To be fair, the set did include a hell of a lot of filler. Long intros, spiels between songs and the like.
But the kids didn't care. They sang, they danced, the whole band gave it their all. Frank Iero spun out of control.
Two Stained-Glass shaped screens that flanked the drum riser projected a mixture of religious images and psychadaelic swirls.
The band played a set that drew on both their albums, plus a new song that sounded strangely like Last Christmas by George Michael.
I have seen better performances by better bands.
But the crowd, all of them in black and red, some sporting Nightmare Before Christmas patches, many of them young enough for their parents to be waiting outside at the end, some so young that their parents accompanied them inside the hall, they loved it.
For them, it was little short of a religious experience.
posted by the.exile at 11:09 AM
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