Enter Shikari, House Vs.Hurricane, Hand of Mercy @UNSW Roundhouse, Sydney(23/09/10)

Wed 29th Sep, 2010 in Gig Reviews

Not a great deal was memorable about Hand of Mercy, the first band to try and wind up the crowd before Enter Shikari took to the stage. There was some running around, a hideous pornstar moustache on one of the guitarists and plenty of repetitive structure going around their weak, uninspiring tough-guy act. As they played through original tracks that suggested titles such as Is This Breakdown Still Going?, Nobody Thinks You’re Tough, Lead Singer Dude – You’re Wearing An Attack Attack! Shirt and This Part Sounds Like Limp Bizkit , it felt as if we were experiencing the first twenty minutes of a really weak edition of triple j’s Short Fast Loud program – it was the ultimate realisation that it was all the same band that made this a truly depressing exercise in beat-down hardcore.

Melbourne sextet House Vs Hurricane don’t have the same identity crisis, as by now most – if not all – of the audience in attendance know exactly who they are. That said, this doesn’t make their music any more banal, contrived and forced. If anything, it solidifies these aspects. Performing tracks mostly lifted from their debut, Perspectives, the band went through the motions of their hollow, trend-hopping synthcore with little interest shown from any member of the band. At one point, keyboardist Joey Fragione got so insanely bored with his usual routine of not doing much and pressing a button every four minutes that he began cracking beers and throwing around glow sticks. You’d be bored too if everything you contributed could be done by an iPod. Another average performance from a band that can only really be described as aggressively bland.

Only one band could save us now – the hyper British kids that have, for the past few years, brought energy, humour and innovation to what was becoming a potentially fatal hybrid genre. Enter Shikari may not have packed the Roundhouse out entirely tonight, but their heroes’ welcome as they made their way on stage amidst a flash of white strobe lights was as loud as you may hear in any stadium. Solidarity kicked off their set with the exact level of body-flailing enthusiasm that the quartet needed, not standing still for a second as they worked to get the crowd on side. Not that it was ever much of a problem – regardless of whether they were showcasing from their latest, Common Dreads, revisiting 2007’s Take to the Skies or going even further back to some of the first songs they ever wrote, they had a faithful audience that gave every song a hearty roar of support upon their completion – impressive in its own right, given that most of them were far too young to muster up much more than a squeal.

Frontman Rou Reynolds was all smiles – no matter how many times he brings it up, he still sounds genuinely amazed that the band has such a following “on the other side of the world.” No time to get sentimental, though – he was off within seconds warping his synthesizer to all new levels of weirdness, screaming like a banshee and literally walking over the crowd and screeching the song’s hook (if you can call “you do this every fucking time” a hook) during No Sssweat – a gig tradition that never seems to lose its intensity.

The rest of the band – guitarist Rory Clewlow, drummer Rob Rolfe and bassist Chris Batten – were similarly excited, engaging the crowd with their wry humour and unashedly dorky dance moves. Presumably to accommodate Rou’s deeper voice, as well as convenience of tuning, the band played all their older songs in lower keys than their recorded versions. It’s not a concept they’ve entirely mastered just yet – Return to Energizer started sloppily and only got slightly better, while Mothership was basically a mess. It thankfully came together after awhile, resulting in some particularly enjoyable renditions of The Feast, Enter Shikari (yep, they have have their own title track) and their now-ubiquitous hit, Sorry, You’re Not A Winner.

Though they couldn’t quite match the chaos of their sweltering mid-afternoon set at 2008’s Big Day Out, Enter Shikari are still a worthy investment live. They’re boisterous, relentless and, above all, great fun – amidst a flood of shitty copycats with brooding MySpace photos and monotonous song structure, it’s good to know that at least someone knows how to do it properly.

Check out the photos from the gig