Tonight is a highly anticipated night, for me personally anyway. As a long standing fan of Emarosa my life thus far has been filled with constant website checks and ticking off days on my calendar.
With an ever growing fan base, and the release of a new album earlier this year, there’s no doubt many people would sympathise will my slightly obsessive behaviour of late, and perhaps have indulged in it themselves.
And for this reason predominantly, it is why the gig is... in the simplest terms, a bit of a letdown.
The night starts well, the first support act All Forgotten bound on stage and throw out some easy rock songs, perhaps edging a little too far towards the pop rock for tonight’s bill but nevertheless the reception they receive is agreeable. As a band having toured with Paramore in their early days and discussing recording their second EP there’s obvious room for development and further achievement, and after their short set this appears to be very possible.
The second of tonight’s support bands is Yashin, the band stand alone as having considerably more success than the openers and this is demonstrated within the crowd reception. Lead singers Kevin Miles and Harry Radford do their utmost to tempt the crowd into getting involved in a mass moshpit, which at one point is mildly successful, yet there’s no real sense of occasion during their set.
By 10pm the headliners have taken the stage, and at this point the small crowd that have turned out tonight do begin to show some signs of excitement and eagerness. They start the set with the tried and tested The Past Should Stay Dead; Jonny Craig spills into the epic first line and it seems that tonight is going to be historic.
However, as they progress through the set, with a mix of old songs from second album Relativity and the decidedly different sounds from their new self titled release, in some ways the two don’t gel as well as they might tonight.
This teamed with the elephant in the room situation regarding the sound, makes some points very cringe worthy, the issues with sound causing Jonny’s famous vocals (which are not on form tonight anyway) to become lost towards the back of the room. The set itself is very short and the crowd participation begins to dwindle as the fans begin to voice their thoughts on the problem with the sound guy.
The band comes back for a one song encore and Jonny Craig makes his expected mini speech ‘ I don’t care if you like my band or not..’ it does inspire some movement from the crowd but it all seems rather too little too late. Despite this their last song Set It Off Like Napalm is sung brilliantly and was easily the best song of the night.
Regardless of the technical problems and the perhaps slightly strained atmosphere at points tonight, the band can come away from this opening night of the tour mostly unscathed. The hardcore fans will of course place the difficulties with sound solely onto the sound guy and everyone else is likely to put it down to a just a one off bad gig.
But let’s hope for the band and the fans sake that things can only get better, because after tonight’s performance I don’t think they could get that much worse.
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