A Day To Remember, Underoath,Hopeless @ Festival Hall,Melbourne (12/05/2011)

Wed 18th May, 2011 in Gig Reviews

In spite of the cold, there was an early buzz around Festival Hall on Thursday night. By 6pm, Docklands was awash with kids clad in skinny jeans and bright tees, all hopping from foot to foot and chattering with anticipation. It was pretty clear that the “pop-mosh” behemoth that is A Day To Remember had plenty of people excited.

By the time Melbourne’s own Hopeless took to the stage, there was a sea of excited faces filling the floor and balconies. The band sounded phenomenal and didn’t seem daunted by the huge venue, and it was impressive to see them command the attention of the whole place so early in the night. All too quickly though, it was time for Underoath to shine. From the first warped note of In Regard To Myself, the band were at their energetic peak, thrashing all over the place amid the machine-gun bursts of light from every direction. These guys know how to handle a big venue, and in Festival Hall they sounded enormous. Screamer Spencer Chamberlain proved more than capable of handling clean vocal duties, and the band had no trouble pulling off a handful of their older screamo classics. The light show proved a bit too hypnotising during the droning newer songs that seemed to eat up half of the set, and for a while there it was difficult to stay focussed on the music. Then at the critical moment, the band launched into a wave of older songs, managing to pull together a headliner-quality performance.

As the giant black curtain was heaved away to reveal A Day To Remember, any expectations of the Floridians were immediately blown out of the water. Through Festival Hall’s monstrous sound system, the intro to Sticks And Bricks was like a giant fist to the eardrum, punctuated with several cannon-loads of confetti and a blinding burst of purple and white light. The crowd responded with equal force, tearing the floor up with a rabid, almost frightening energy. Few bands seem to bring their full stage setup to Australia these days, so the fancy light-up backdrops, the ramps and platforms snaking around the drum kit and the toilet paper, balloons, free t-shirts and beach balls launched into the crowd amid repeated confetti blasts all served to further enhance the terrific atmosphere. Just when the constant shower of projectiles was starting to lose its impact, Jeremy McKinnon handed vocal duties on Homesick over to guitarist Kevin Skaff, to allow him to crowdsurf inside a giant transparent bubble.

The band timed the theatrics perfectly alongside what can only be described as a flawless setlist. Heavy songs and pop punk-leaning numbers were present in equal volume, and the crystal clear yet aptly bass-heavy mix engendered every song with a pounding intensity. Drawing from each of their albums, the band would hit hard for a couple of songs, then tone it down a little to give everybody a bit of recovery time. This allowed the inclusion of the semi-acoustic If It Means A Lot To You, which proved to be an unexpected highlight, and also kept the crowd’s energy up at all the critical moments. This meant that when McKinnon asked for a circle pit during Why Walk On Water When We’ve Got Boats, he got one hell of a fucking circle pit. The thing was literally wall to wall.

Capping off the night with the ever-impressive The Downfall Of Us All and unleashing a tonne of balloons from a huge net above the crowd in the process, A Day To Remember ended a very impressive set on a high note. There was something special in the air, and it wasn’t entirely surprising when McKinnon declared the show as his favourite of all time, daring us to fact-check him online. I did, and it’s difficult to suggest that he was lying.