After a bafflingly lengthy wait at the door, punters were keen for the music to get started. Sydney band Van She kicked off proceedings, garnering some interest with their reverb-drenched sound. Variously channelling Talking Heads and a moderately cheery Joy Division, the heavy use of echo effects and occasional bite to the music couldn’t disguise the essentially pop core of the band. This went down well with the crowd, unsurprising given headliners End of Fashion’s brand of pop-flavoured rock.
Next to take the stage were New York rockers The Cloud Room, striking a neat balance between the synth hooks of their fellow bands and a more ethereal, earnest sound. With a tighter sound than the first support, The Cloud Room managed to draw significant attention from the crowd for their Muse-like combination of edgy rock and fragile vocals. The New Yorkers showed a more diverse palette, also, with various songs bringing to mind The Hives (albeit with less venom and more angst), the mellow contentment of The Beatles and the stadium drama of Coldplay and U2.However hard they tried, though, the supports couldn’t match the response received by End of Fashion.
The crowd seething, the murmurs of discontent had barely begun to grow when End of Fashion took the stage, prompting a mighty roar. Certainly adding to the atmosphere was the left-field use of the A-Team theme as a stage introduction, which baffled many but had others in fits of laughter.
No one could accuse these boys of lacking confidence. From the moment they took the stage, it was a non-stop parade of strutting and rock-posing, and the crowd ate it all up. Screams and shouts filled the air, with rock-fingers popping up like toadstools after rain.Kicking off with pop gem ‘Love Comes In’, End of Fashion got the crowd moving, though there seemed to be some confusion about how best to express the music. In fact, this was a feature of the night. Given that End of Fashion make accessible pop-rock, their music really lacks the rock bite to get a crowd jumping, but is too engaging to sit still. So for the rest of the night, the crowd did their best to dance to the energetic rhythms. In spite of it all, though, the response was positive and energetic in sync with the music.Showing true flair was the decision to include a diverse range of material, including songs from EPs and unreleased material. Though the crowd generally seemed confused by any song that wasn’t ‘O Yeah’ or ‘She’s Love’, the enthusiasm didn’t wane for the fact that the songs were less familiar. To make such a step shows that the boys from End of Fashion are truly confident in their work, even though the non-album material would’ve slotted neatly into their self-titled debut LP.
Adding extra interest was the reworking of some intros, like the staccato rendition of the opening chords to She’s Love that at first confused the crowd, but the surprise brought on a bigger cheer than it might have otherwise.
The energy never seemed to wane, with guitar-thrashing and crowd banter going non-stop. At the climax of the main show, both guitarists literally threw their guitars down in a very rock fashion, though Pete Townshend has nothing to worry about.
In the encore, though, an abrupt change in mood left the crowd restless, and seemed to take the gloss off the evening for many. Shifting down gears rapidly, they finished the show off with the album-ender ‘Seize the Day’, a much slower track with greater emotional ambiguity than the rest of the happy songs. Many members of the crowd became restless at this stage, uncertain as to whether to leave or to stay. While it was bold of the boys to make the choice to include a different style into their set, it seems to have backfired because its placement at the end of the set. Perhaps it would’ve worked better towards the middle, where slower numbers more commonly find themselves, in order to leave people on an energetic note.
Beyond this, though, the crowd response seemed generally positive. People walked away smiling, cradling freshly purchased merch, which is always a good sign. Though it never really lifted from good into great, End of Fashion are definitely a band to check out as they grow. Once they have crowds who actually know the album material, the shows will explode, guaranteed.