Taking Back Sunday fans are a funny lot. One minute they’re enamoured by the heady melodies and skewiff guitars, the next they’re heckling the band and calling them fat. It’s odd, but even the most beloved of bands need an affectionate jab to the ribcage every once in a while, and this New York-based five-piece got theirs in Sydney.

The emo-pop outfit, with more line-up changes in its eleven-year lifespan than sweaty mid-song hair flicks, as much drama, volume, and energy to the stage as on their albums. Kicking off their packed-out Metro show with old favourites, What’s It Feel Like To Be a Ghost? and _You’re So Last Summer. Frontman, Adam Lazzara, whose once boyishly pretty hair now hangs thick and long in the style of a certain Biblical personality’s, owns the stage like a seasoned professional, sometimes prowling moodily, sometimes attached to the microphone stand with an iron grip.

Pausing momentarily to declare Sydney gorgeous, Lazzara lays on thick the sentimental banter early, “We’d rather look at your eyes than camera lenses,” only to be cut short by a surly heckler who rather overzealously responded by calling them “fags”. The rest of the crowd looked at each other incredulously, no doubt wondering why she forked out the cash for a ticket in the first place, while the band shrugged it off and launched into the clench-teethed vocals and punctuated guitars of Carpathia’s opening bars. The relentless catchiness that rendered it a favourite from last year’s New Again obviously not lost on the now fully riled-up dance floor.

The fast-paced You Know How I Do and melancholic One-Eighty By Summer were greeted with crowd-surfers as the band leaped about the stage with punkish abandon, while the much darker Lonely Lonely set the tone to despondent, the strung-out guitars betraying a hint of swirling psychaedelia at the utmost of volumes. 2002’s Timberwolves At New Jersey followed, and then the stadium-friendly Everything Must Go, with Lazzara’s hair-flicking and growling complementing the grandstand melodrama the track.

Another attempt at banter opened with Lazzara telling some oddly hostile fans not to boo him, “I can hear you from here!” before admitting how much it hurt to be away from home. “But being here is like all of our wildest dreams come true.” An irritated, “Come on man, I can spill beer on myself on my own!” was met by another embarrassingly loud heckle from a drunken crowd member along the lines of “not being paid to talk,” and the beleaguered band continued with A Decade Under the Influence and Make Damn Sure.

It was genuinely surprising at the time that the band played no encore, especially now that it’s well and truly become the norm, but in hindsight, despite the vast majority of the crowd acting like years-long avid fans, those few vocal hecklers might have cost them their TBS nightcap.

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