Kasabian, The Vaccines @Festival Hall, Melbourne(28/01/12)

Wed 1st Feb, 2012 in Gig Reviews

Australia’s summer festival circuit has again yielded an astonishing influx of bands and artists from abroad, with fans spoiled for choice in the process. With such a dramatic overstock of talent, you’d swear a reckless wholesale rug outlet had a hand in creating the happy conundrum. Amid the familiar spate of sideshow madness, two big-name bands were thrown together in one auspicious billing: indie-rock stalwarts Kasabian and hysterically hyped Londoners The Vaccines.

The Vaccines were up first, favouring heavy-handed distortion in the presentation of their revivalist post-punk. This was a hit-and-miss set, its highlights obvious. At times, a furious wall of noise served to obscure the intricacies of the band’s craft, with much of the set relegated to incomprehensible wailing and rock-and-roll posturing. The Vaccines’ would turn to their pronounced melodic prowess to make an impact, helping to defy the blunt, monotonous roar of their approach. Songs like the shot-in-the-arm rocker Wreckin’ Bar (Ra Ra Ra), the fun-loving If You Wanna and the methodical Post-Break-Up Sex were clear standouts. The band had the goods to energise Festival Hall early on in the evening, if only in fits and starts.

At their finest, The Vaccines are formidable song-smiths with a few charming tunes up their sleeves, conjuring comparisons to The Strokes and Interpol. The highlights of this set demonstrated as much. However, for all of the peaks, there were just as many troughs throughout, much of their material apparently failing to translate to a live setting. Some of it just wasn’t as enthralling as expected, their collection of songs complacently cut from the same ferocious indie-rock cloth. When The Vaccines weren’t delivering their delicious hooks and at their gratifying prime, moments bled into one another. This was one of those sets where you could take the best and leave the rest – and, with their appearance clocking in at just 37 minutes and 58 seconds it wasn’t too difficult to sift the filler. Overall, this was just satisfying enough.

An 8-bit cacophony brought Kasabian bounding out to the stage, a warm reception shared between band and audience. The Leicestershire lads stirred a frenzy early, the gruff, gravelly Shoot The Runner enabling fans to cut loose, with the bullish bravado of Velociraptor inciting a similar climate. The set’s first awe-inspiring segment arrived in Empire, however, a sea of flailing limbs and soles punishing the Festival Hall floor. “Stop!” came the collective cry from the venue, fingers thrust toward the ceiling with a blinding flash of light. The scale of each moment to the next became magnificent, Kasabian navigating a superb set of rousing indie-rock with great cohesion. Pleasingly, they would never miss a beat the night long.

An impressively precise rendition of L.S.F. would ultimately steal the show. As Kasabian unveiled the song, a man in a wife-beater singlet could be seen flipping off an entire wing of seated patrons. It was an oddly antagonistic manoeuvre to be made towards complete strangers, though it was not without a purpose. His brutish taunt delivered a home truth; that this was, quite obviously, a gig best experienced in the mosh-pit. Kasabian went onto prove it, too, staging a terrific finale to their set with a little help from their fans.

Towards the end of L.S.F., the instrumentation ebbed away, layer by layer. As the band exited in dribs and drabs, a lone piano was left to accompany a crowd intent on roaring the song back towards the stage in the band’s absence. Eventually, the keys, too, would fade into nothingness. The silence suddenly paved the way for a magical moment, thousands of patrons – in a split second of unity – resolving to up the ante. An eruption followed, the tune now booming throughout the venue in a tremendous, spine-tingling show of support for the band. The chant would repeat ad nauseum, the stamps of feet steadily gaining in prominence. As calls for encores go, this was absolutely moving.

Of course, Kasabian did return to the stage, quickly exuding their casual brilliance once again. They seemed somehow warmer towards the Melbourne crowd, much more willing to engage in a dialogue with the venue. “If you stand still, this motherfucker’s gonna come and get ya,” front man Tom Meighan informed the audience ahead of Vlad The Impaler, referring to their roadie Rick. The shenanigans spilled over into the evening’s finale, Fire, the band commanding the entire venue to crouch. After a short time, Festival Hall would again awaken and party with Kasabian towards a spectacular finish.

Overall, this was an evening that lived up to the immense allure that the double-bill originally floated. While The Vaccines were fallible and a little patchy, they were at least satisfying. The accomplished Kasabian, meanwhile, shone, commanding fits of wild abandon and staging a fun, frenzied and entertaining indie-rock spectacle.