Brian King, frontman of the riotous Vancouver two-piece Japandroids, has described his band’s music as a “blitzkrieg”, with songs not being finished until they are “Blitzkrieg enough”.
The term is certainly a rock cliché on the back of the Ramones classic, but in a sense it was the perfect cliché to describe Japandroids’ first headlining Sydney show at Sydney University’s Manning Bar.
As King played his first chords and drummer Prowse deployed his first beats, the small circles of polite, beer-swilling men transformed.
Shirts were ripped off, limbs flailed without rhythm or style; fists were pumped and lyrics yelled out as punters moshed so exuberantly, they didn’t know which way to face. I suspect they didn’t care.
The room went from nought to 100 as fast as any Ferrari, as office workers, students, and tradies let out every frustration and every ounce of unspent energy in a moshpit that progressively absorbed the dance floor.
It was a blitzkrieg to the uninitiated, a lightning war against the everyday grind. A war they won – achieving catharsis.
The band’s set dug deep into their catalogue, filled with favourites for their fans. The crowd came alive early in the set for ‘The Boys Are Leaving Town’ and ‘Younger Us’.
There was a release of collective anticipation in the room for ‘Young Hearts Spark Fire’ and ‘The House That Heaven Built’, which made them two of the highlights of the set.
Japandroids channel a distinctly ‘90s sound in a way that is largely missing in popular music today. It’s lo-fi, no bullshit punk rock that skips on the cheese, wardrobes, and posturing of many contemporaries.
It also avoids the pitfalls of being overly sentimental and earnest. The closest they get is the “something like a love song” ‘Continuous Thunder’. The track provided a roomy, atmospheric breather moment, and served as welcome counter-point to break up the rest of the set.
The band have described the song as the hardest of their repertoire to write, but similar material would serve to add dynamic shifts in the band’s frantic live set if they decided to explore it more in the future.
And that brings up the only problem with Japandroids’ show – it all simply sounded the same.
Every song occupies the same space, the band anchored so firmly in their comfort zone that they might as well have played the same song repeatedly for a large part of the set. They’re a lot of fun, but they’re a band for diehards.
There’s only so many fuzzed-out, power chord-laden, backbeat-driven songs a casual fan can take. Aside from the aforementioned ‘Continuous Thunder’ and a few songs that experimented with call-and-response and machine gun beats, the song structures and tones changed little during the set.
King worships Guns N’ Roses, but seems to subscribe to the anti-solo, Johnny Ramone school of guitar playing.
Someone in the crowd licked me. That was weird. And while the set dragged in parts, it was also a lot of fun – and in a way, exactly what it was supposed to be.
I find it hard to believe that many people left the Manning Bar with anything left in the tank. Japandroids certainly didn’t.
