Review: Everything Everything and The Vaccines at Metro City

Everything Everything and The Vaccines at Metro City
w/ Joan & the Giants
Saturday, May 4, 2024

I’m a Metro City apologist and am not afraid to admit it. When you’ve seen as many unforgettable shows as I have in this unique venue, you tend to forget they have the worst beer selection in Perth.

Just last year, they hosted Canadians Alvvays to wild acclaim. But the divisive Northbridge thunderdome has always been a bit weird when it’s empty, and for whatever reason, this cracking double bill featuring Manchester art-rockers Everything Everything and London rock revivalists The Vaccines failed to capture the public’s attention.

Considering both acts starred at consecutive Falls Festivals less than a decade ago, it was a surprising result in a year when so many tours have left us off their itineraries (it’s true Perth, we let ourselves down again here).

But if not everything, everything worked; plenty did. Not least of all, local support act Joan & the Giants, who transformed the night from a double bill into a minor festival with their inspired starting set. Fresh from triumphantly opening for P!nk in Perth two months ago, fans of Spacey Jane and Middle Kids are sure to resonate (it’s little wonder they occasionally cover the latter).

Sleep Alone was a highlight, but the teen angst of Cool Kid, with its Taylor Swift-like lyrics closing the set, suggested Joan & Co. could be filling their own Metro City by the time a debut record finally arrives.

I hate to be an antivaxxer, but this wasn’t The Vaccines’ night. Not only did they pull the short straw playing first—as we realised the upstairs balconies were probably not going to open after all—but they gave away just how sparse the production was likely to be for the rest of the night, likely due to cutting costs.

Kicking off animatedly enough with Love to Walk Away and Wreckin’ Bar (Ra Ra Ra), the highlight also came early when debut album tracks Post Break-Up Sex and Wetsuit merged one into the next. But it was the extended mid-section of their set that dragged unapologetically, as the West Londoners (now only featuring two original members) stumbled through recent ‘hits’ from dance-rock that didn’t work (Headphones Baby) to unfamiliar recent singles (Heartbreak Kid).

Barely touching on their underrated third outing, English Graffiti, despite its one-cut Handsome significantly lifting the mood for all of two minutes, it took until the closing 10 minutes starring It’s Always You and If You Wanna for their Interpol-via-Best Coast mood to finally escalate again. By then, it was too little, too late.

Fortunately, Everything Everything arrived to save the day. And the Mancs proved they really are an underrated art-rock force when headlining their own show.

If the production wasn’t a vast improvement in terms of lighting and visuals, the sound was eerily perfect, as a backing track of programmed electronic synths lifted the accompanying live instrumentation. And unlike The Vaccines, their ordering of the setlist made for a constant build towards an incredible peak.

Starting with the opening two tracks from this year’s impressive Mountainhead, The End of the Contender was quickly a new fan fave. Slowly, over the course of an hour that went too quickly, older highlights such as Kemosabe and Teletype entered the fray, while Night of the Long Knives exceeded its studio counterpart and Cough Cough reminded us of Everything Everything’s weirdo credentials, sounding plenty like Animal Collective.

There were plenty of songs from A Fever Dream to The Mad Stone to Can’t Do, that it felt like they could’ve been added to extend the set, but these left room for the likes of Photoshop Handsome, an unexpected detour back to debut album Man Alive, which was a thrashy highlight unlike anything else played all night, before the ever-popular Distant Past closed the main set on an ecstatic high.

It had taken an hour for something from landmark 2015 album Get to Heaven to drop (even if the title track itself was a sad omission), but with three of the last four tracks, it left little doubt as to what fans—and the band themselves—acknowledge as their best record.

And so it was that a completely awe-inspiring encore left fans scratching their heads at the genius of this band. Their ability to meld last year’s excellent Cold Reactor in with an unexpectedly vital Spring / Sun / Winter / Dread was pure levity.

But finale No Reptiles was worth the cost of entry on its own, its swelling crescendo punctuated (as was the night itself) by a moment of rare profundity in peroxided frontman Jonathan Higgs’ lyrics: “Just give me this one night, just one night/ To feel like I might be on the right path/ The path that takes me home… wise enough to know myself."

I’m betting we weren’t the only ones to go home and play No Reptiles on repeat.

HARVEY RAE

Photos by Stu McKay