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Review: Shinedown, O2 Academy
It’s heartening, if not a little amusing, to realise that there is now an audience for whom the great culture wars of the punk rock era are so much ancient history. It’s even more amusing to reflect that many of their parents must be horrified old punk rockers who thought they’d seen off grand concepts and ambitious theatrical presentations for good. Neither of the two main bands playing the Academy tonight are progressive rock acts in any traditional sense of the term, but they’re both touting very different concept albums.
Ohio’s Starset are an unknown quantity to most of this audience and they’re certainly eager to make an impression. Kudos to the headliners for permitting them full use of lights, a great sound and two large projection screens to display suitably cosmic imagery.
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A bit of homework reveals that with this lot the band itself is the concept, their elaborate overarching backstory casting them as a “public outreach initiative” of the fictitious Starset Society, whose function is to explore the social and political impact of emerging technologies sparked by a mysterious transmission picked up by SETI. Cosmic, huh? And ever-so-slightly creepy-culty, though reassuringly bespectacled founder and frontman Dustin Bates’s academic background is in engineering and space science rather than Heaven’s Gate-style millenarian malarkey.
Like Lonely Robot on a much bigger budget, the guitarists and drummer (who’s contained within an acoustic shield and must be absolutely sweltering) all perform in space suits with nifty illuminated breast plates that flash coloured patterns in unison. And we haven’t seen this many cellos on the Academy stage since Apocalyptica last played here.
One of these is wielded by Mariko Muranaka, who’s performed with the likes of Michael Jackson and Madonna and gets to wear a groovy space visor as one of two guest touring musicians with Starset, alongside classical violinist Siobhan Cronin. Both women also multi-task on keyboards.
Yep, the septet look great. And the various descriptions bandied around, from ‘cinematic rock/metal’ to ‘space rock’ (something of a dog whistle to those of us who grew up on Hawkwind), are certainly promising. Shame, then, that the music struggles to live up to this promise, comprising choppy metal riffage, big nu-metal vocals and a modicum of laptop-driven electronica, with occasional quieter instrumental passages which permit those guest musicians to be heard.
It’s all a little like Muse on steroids and starts to get repetitive after a while. Apparently, Bates has expressed a desire to go full prog at some point, which would certainly even up the creative imbalance between concept and music.
Some bands’ songs are delicate, intricate affairs, showcasing their erudition, sensitivity and dexterity. Shinedown are not one of those bands. Your basic Shinedown song is like taking a bunch of huge steel girders and binding them into a sturdy musical framework using giant rivets. On top of this, the band welds a gargantuan rust-proof, bellow-along chorus.
At Music Journalism School, conformity is enforced by instructing students to hate this stuff with every fibre of their beings, risking immediate expulsion with each involuntary tap of the foot. But there’s a reason why Shinedown sell out every UK tour: they’re very, very good at what they do.
The full-on aural assault of Devil kicks off the show, as it does the current Attention Attention album. This is Shinedown’s very first concept piece, though the concept itself is that of a fairly vague emotional journey of which no prior knowledge is required to enjoy the non-genre-specific, positivity-radiating, hook-laden, bounce-along songs. These aren’t played sequentially anyway and are all precision engineered to offer maximum unpretentious air-punching fun, delivered with unwavering energy at agreeably ear-splitting volume as the quartet hurl themselves about the stage and multiple lasers scorch our eyeballs.
No fromage is safe as large-lunged frontman Brent Smith deploys virtually every audience participation gambit known to rock, which proves a tad embarrassing for B24/7 photographer Mike Evans when we’re all encouraged to shake one another’s hands in a big demonstration of Rock Solidarity. Furiously snapping away in the pit to make the most of his standard three-song allocation, Mike initially fails to notice the singer’s own outstretched hand. “That’s probably the longest Brent Smith has had to wait for someone to shake his hand at any of his gigs,” he reflects later.
We also get to jump up and down on command, sing along loudly (obviously) and wave our mobile phones in the air (the modern elf’n’safety equivalent of the old lighters-aloft gambit). The only one he misses out is whipping up a false rivalry between ourselves and those bastards in Cardiff/Birmingham/whereever, who were allegedly much louder and more enthusiastic, though he does have a somewhat disconcerting habit of referring to us as “the UK”.
A well-timed acoustic interlude brings a reworking of crowd favourite The Crow & the Butterfly, followed by the band’s crude but effective cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s great Simple Man, which gets the biggest singalong of the evening. One rather suspects, however, that many here are labouring under the misapprehension that it’s a Shinedown original.
Although they’re impressively tight, this isn’t a band whose individual members are likely to appear on any of those Greatest Musicians lists, as they all work in service of the songs. That said, fantastically named bassist Eric Bass deserves special mention for doubling up on keyboards and acoustic guitar as well as producing the current album.
They seal the deal with the ever-popular title track from Sound of Madness and a suitably euphoric Brilliant, which also closes Attention Attention. Next stop arenas . . .
All photos by Mike Evans
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