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It takes guts for a pop band to play nothing but their brand new album, and play it in full, especially considering the standard pop audience consists of mostly “woo girls” with high hair and higher shoes, and their boyfriends. But the undeniably talented Evermore managed to pull it off with style.

Sometimes a band needs more than just a song to get the message across, sometimes what you need to say encompasses more feelings and ideas than can be fit into three and a half minutes of airtime. And the result of this? The concept album. Evermore’s latest musical offering, Truth of the World (welcome to the show) is just that, and their live show is more than just a collection of their back catalogue, arranged in a crowd-pleasing set list, it’s a journey through the minds and hearts of the band.

The live show was big fat nod in Pink Floyd’s direction; including multi-media displays, ethereal synths and theatrical features. The Hume brothers gave us characters, complete with costumes; not since the hey-days of Smashing Pumpkins has a top hat looked so good. The music was complemented by a massive set of old TV-shaped squares, onto which were projected a range of images, from hundreds of screens showing different clips, to one message being blast across the whole set. This beautiful backdrop was not just pretty to look at, but played an integral part in the show.

They open with a pre-recorded message, which sounds like it may have been a speech played through a 1950s radio, “Sunshine, trees, hills and valleys, flowers and flowing streams. This world of tomorrow is a world of beauty. These eternal things, wrought by God, are lovely and unchanging. Come, let’s travel into the future, what will we see?” This song leaves you feeling hope for what may be, a world filled with wonder. This hopeful and somewhat naive sentiment is all-too-soon crushed by the songs that follow, showing us the greed and exploitation that is the reality of this “beautiful world of tomorrow”.

Drummer/Keyboardist Dann Hume appears behind the keyboard, dressed in a smashing skinny tie and red blazer, and we are introduced to Donovan Earl, the charismatic presenter of “Truth of the World”, a sensationalist news program which is uncomfortably close to what we are presented with every day. We are plunged into an anguished journey through life, as seen by Evermore.

They touch on everything they can think of that is wrong with the world. Beginning with the culture of fear which keeps us glued to our TV screens, mindlessly accepting everything from news, to advertisements as truth. They also show distaste for the culture of over-medication, where every little ailment can be solved with a pill. They even kindly package a cure-all for us; Truthogen. It’s a story Aldus Huxley would be proud of.

Throughout the show, there was this constant niggling thought that just maybe, they are rebelling against something they are a part of, the greedy world of the “music business”. Evermore have firmly planted themselves in the realm of pop, but perhaps they are hoping that label can be revised. They are more than an OC ad, and actually seem a little sick of playing their chart-smashing hits like, Running and Light Surrounding You, which were tacked on at the end of the show as an encore – so as not to completely alienate the aforementioned “woo girls”. They even broke out into a little jam session when they played It’s Too Late, which was actually pretty cool, but vocalist/guitarist, Jon Hume said at the end, as he stared out at some slightly confused faces “I guess we won’t be doing THAT again…” It’s a bit of a shame when creativity is crushed by commercial expectation. Luckily, with multiple platinum albums, the Hume brothers may have made enough cash to now do whatever they want. It may be an uphill battle to become accepted by music snobs as more than throw-away pop artists, but they’ve definitely given it a good start.

Were you there? Find yourself in Sharpshooter’s gallery