CHECK OUT THE PHOTOS FROM THE SHOW RIGHT HERE ON FL.

Stealing O’Neal are everything you’d expect of their genre and generation: telling stories of intoxication, of naked Maccas runs being filmed and posted to MySpace, incessantly hyping the crowd for the bands to come.

The Aussie five piece pop punk outfit follows closely in the footsteps of The Getaway Plan, Horsell Common and Kisschasy. Not quite as polished, but the same three chords and yelping vocals are there, with the barely-legal audience hardly moving to show their appreciation besides the odd head nod and leg shake. Stealing O’Neal aren’t unbearable, they’re just generic. I haven’t heard them on record but they sound just as good live as any of their overseas peers with twice their age and experience.

A voice from behind the curtain says “10 from 10.” Ten seconds later curtains open and noise pummels the audience. Set Your Goals have arrived, and the energy level in the place instantly triples.

The dual vocal assault of Matt Wilson and Jordan Brown is a strange one but it works. The juxtaposition of Brown’s relentless spoken word style announcing and Wilson’s chipmunk melodic punk vocals harks back to the 1990s heyday of pop punk unsullied by emo wailing.

Even with the top floor closed and the lower floor half filled, we have ourselves a mosh pit folks! Not one quite large enough to accommodate crowd surfers though, as one eager punter found out the hard way.

Set Your Goals are a truly vocal-led band, with the workhorse instrumentalists happily pogoing about in the background. Their set contains most songs off their 2006 release Mutiny, with To Be Continued an early highlight. The Californian sextet offer Mutiny’s title track as their encore, and man is it a fun song! Set Your Goals may not be pitch perfect but they sure crank out a rad show.

All Time Low have two pretty guitarists with slick haircuts, a fan’s D-cup bra slung over their mic stand and some fairly standard emo pop punk tunes. They may be the headliner but the energy has slid a notch from Set Your Goal’s set.

Ten minutes into their set bassist Zack Merrick seems to have hijacked the PA and they rumble through a track with bass rattling the walls. Set Your Goal’s bassist Joe Saucedo jumps onstage dressed only in boxers and a poster attached to his bare chest saying “HOTTER THAN ALEX”, referring to All Time Low’s leading man on vocals and guitar, Alex Gaskarth. The truth of the statement is debatable, as Alex receives far more girly screams than Joe when he addresses the crowd.

A frighteningly great pop punk rendition of Rhianna’s Umbrella pips Plain White T’s cover by a mile, leading me to the conclusion that All Time Low ain’t so bad if emo pop is your bag. Emo? My definition tonight is the emo that people stereotypically use as an insult: the radio-friendly (but more importantly, television-friendly), slick and nauseating cheese peddled by fringed and skinny jeaned boys. Their audience? Screaming Gen Z girls accompanied by their band-identical boyfriends.
– œLegal age’ gags unsurprisingly dominate All Time Low’s stage banter, considering their all ages show at the 500-capacity Princess Theatre was sold out. Tonight’s 18+ show looks sparsely populated but the attendance figures are probably comparable, though I’m not sure how legal this crowd would be on the band’s home soil.

Set Your Goals drummer Michael Ambrose joins All Time Low onstage, steering them out of bland and boring territory to premier a new song. Weightless epitomizes why All Time Low are so popular with their aforementioned fans: great vocal harmonies, kickin’ rhythm section and guitar-around-neck-swinging abilities. The annoyingly poptastic Dear Maria gets the obligatory encore thrashing, right before half the audience turns into pumpkins.

If I only dish out one piece of advice in my life, it’s to take earplugs to the Hi-Fi. It’s a great venue (wall paint and bar size notwithstanding), but every show I’ve seen here has been phenomenally, if not criminally loud. I’m taking bets on how long before the carpets become as sticky as The Arena.