Fucked Up. From the name alone they’re not going to draw the masses, as tonight’s semi-bare floor clearly demonstrates at The Sugarmill. But the masses aren’t what the deepest ethics of punk involves, right?
As support band SSS take the stage, they manage to transform an awkward crowd, consisting of less than 90 people, into a 3-D riot. The singer steps off the stage and onto the floor, where lies a U-shape space, stirring up the crowd with loud, rowdy punk.
Well done then, because as much as you think a band can rile a crowd up, there hasn’t been many front men who can half-nakedly dry hump a crowd member, cover everyone else in his own sweat and make the rest fall in love with him. Pink Eyes is here and by Jingo is he ready to roll.
‘Baiting the Public’ rolls out first, and what a convenient song for this decade’s most antagonistic singer to be shouting as he dives into the crowd and gets in everyone’s face in reach. Lets clear things up, this show is all about front-man Pink Eyes. Without him, Fucked Up would just be another great rock band making there way town-to-town for a living. It’s Pink Eyes who makes the show what it is, a ballistic night to remember.
By the time we have realised that there is substance behind the distortion, a freak-riot has broken out involving the singer and the front half of the crowd in a raucous, violent love-in during 2nd song ‘Vivian Girls’.
Pink Eyes may be in a hurry to play great music, but he shows he is in no mood to skip around the recent Canadian uprising; ‘First they sent Avril Lavigne and Celine Dion as the landing party, but we are the Cavalry’, he chooses as the introduction for ‘Crusades’, (opener to 2006’s LP ‘Hidden World’), a rollocking, rolling boulder of a live tune.
Great songs come and go in a flurry of pheromones, which is Pink Eyes’ explanation for everyone going crazy, and by the time they’re playing ‘Black Albino Bones’, it’s too late for anyone to leave. We’re already encapsulated by not only the ferocious stagemanship, but also damn catchy songs.
‘No ‘Two Snakes’?’ I ask the alarmingly friendly front man after the gig. ‘Nah, I hate that song!’. A bold statement against a song with so much energy it could have torn The Sugarmill in two tonight, but I guess that says a lot about the tunes that made the set list.
Join Basementbrain on Facebook and Twitter
Comments
Post a Comment