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Evermore, New Zealand’s very own Queen, trucked their high-budget spectacular into Canberra on an icy Wednesday night to showcase a new concept album. Armed to the teeth with audio-visual special effects, powerful amps and worldly views, they were always going to make an impact. As seems often to be the case with grandiose political statements, it was so long-winded that by the time they got to the punch line most of us had forgotten what the issue was. But just like the red team on Master Chef (who earlier in the evening had won their challenge through a favourable last impression), Evermore finished with a sweet splash of hits in a memorable encore. Whether that made anyone a winner at the end of the night is up for discussion.

Before any of that happened, two fantastic support sets set the tone. With the ANU Bar configured in a new West-facing direction for good feng shui, Adelaide’s The Sundance Kids huddled up for a tight set, the showpiece of which was a new single, All Things Stable. These guys ooze well-bred free settler Adelaide pride, in music as well as appearance. This means neat tunes, great vocals – hats off to frontman Ash Gale and bassist Jeremy Wright – and a beaut stage presence.

In brilliant contrast, when second starters End of Fashion showed up it was a sweaty, tongues-out rock experience from the word go. End of Fashion just released their second album, Book Of Lies, but given it’s four years since their world-beating self-titled debut, they seem to have been around for yonks. The new songs sounded good. Kamikaze, pretty early in the set, was a great coup, traversing between happy and sad, clean and dirty, loud and soft, and all to great effect. The old hits, Oh Yeah and The Game still rock out and the band makes for quite a visual – Rodney Avarena especially, has got to be Jack Black School of Rock alumni.

Come 10:30 the lights went down, the projector revved up and Evermore descended, seamlessly connected to the intro backing track of the mentioned new record, Truth of the World: Welcome to the Show. What followed was 75 minutes of “infotainmentology”, which means three bros and a ho playing weird power ballads to lament the terminal state of trash media and political propaganda – hear hear! The talent of all four is formidable and was on clear display in the first five songs, through a great track called Between The Lines to the current, very Backstreet Boys single Hey Boys And Girls. There was some spectacular drumming from brother Dann and some mean rock’n’roll moves by brothers Jon and Peter (save Jon’s hand movements which are way too Jesus-like).

As it became apparent we were in for the long haul, and It’s Too Late wasn’t coming out any time soon, the audience began to waver. Those who knew the new album knew it contains 13 songs and staring down another eight, with knees beginning to ache, was a daunting prospect. But that didn’t dent the band’s energy, and to their credit they continued to pound their way through to the glorious ending. Everybody’s Doing It was the best of this bunch, with a powerful marching groove that helped drive home a message about subservience and conformity (well that’s one interpretation).

The three-song encore shed all the pretence and reminded the 104.7 listeners why they love this band so much. Light Surrounding You and It’s Too Late are stadium-filling pop classics, and you’re bullshitting if you say you wouldn’t have fun dancing to them at a wedding (or a funeral). It was also in the encore that we finally saw some spontaneity, as a little guitar tuning became a 5-minute intermission in between verses. It was great – wish there’d been more.

Here’s a grandiose statement: How to perform a concept album. Take the best bits of your concepts and let the crowd consider the conceptual gaps. Never conceive of playing the fucker in full.

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