Live Review: The Smith Street Band, The Front Bottoms, Apologies, I Have None, Kiri

The mezzanine level is open and people are pouring into the Hi-Fi as soon as the doors open tonight; a rag-tag bunch of Melbourne punks used to play little DIY venues, but now their shows feel like an Event. Said Event gives local collective Kiri a chance to showcase the spazzed-out mathy post-hardcore of their debut 7” to perhaps their biggest audience ever. Good on the headliners for keeping an ear to the underground and helping to expose what’s cool.

London’s Apologies, I Have None are up next, and offer up a pretty potent slab of melancholy to temper the mood of the evening. Even if things do get pretty downbeat, it’s pretty hard to deny the band’s attempt to marry Christian Death and Fugazi.

The whole punk poet thing was around before The Smith Street Band went and conquered the globe, but since they did their influence is starting to be heard on other bands. Case in point, The Front Bottoms. These Americans do the same heart-on-sleeve lyrics and the same general looseness on stage because emotional catharsis is always going to be way more important than getting everything to sound perfect. And the crowd is right there with them; this is after all a sold out Smith Street Band show, so it stands to reason that people would dig what The Front Bottoms have to offer.

It seems whenever The Smith Street Band roll through town, they're proclaiming they’ve reached some new milestone. Tonight it's that they're playing a headline show to more people than they ever have before in their career. And the crowd is stoked to help Wil and the boys get to that level. Maybe it’s because as they’ve continued to grow they’ve remained earnestly honest, but The Smith Street Band have attracted very little of the underground tall poppy backlash. Only the most jaded foot soldier of the fashion gestapo could deny the rousing charm of cuts like Sigourney Weaver or Something I Can Hold In My Hands. Instead of grumbling about the little band that got big, the crowd is right there with The Smith Street Band, smiling enthusiastically and devoid of irony – which is quite a feat if you’re concurrently wearing a HUF five-panel.

The whole pit is singing back, word for word, whenever TSSB hit anything off their just-released third long player, Throw Me in the River, and everyone seems to be having a good time, despite how sweaty everything is getting. As long as The Smith Street Band can continue to inspire and uplift audiences like they do tonight, they’ll never become too big for their own good. It will be interesting to see how big a venue they pack out the next time they roll through town.