Live Review: 4 Walls Festival 2013

4 Walls is a festival that markets itself as for the youth, by the youth, and this year's organisers have done a great job putting together a line-up of cool, young bands. Which is fortunate, because the festival itself kind of feels like a giant school dance and for those of us here over the age of 18 it's a little bit too reminiscent of high school to be completely comfortable.

Go Violets are on the main stage, and fight to stop their sound being swallowed up while they're spread around the huge stage. These songs are just too damn strong to be squashed, though, and the band rips through their opener Runner, filling up the gaps between them with energy and charisma. The genius of Go Violets is in their contradictions; their music manages to be tough, sweet, commanding and sultry all at once, and the young crowd is eating out of their hands by the time they close up with current single Josie.

Sports Fan are a band that sound so much like Ben Folds Five it takes a while to work out that they're not just doing a series of obscure covers. They're fine musicians, but have ripped off whole keyboard parts almost completely, and are in no way young enough for that to be okay. Ball Park Music's Jen Boyce is brought on late in the set for no discernible reason.

Surfer Cats do surf punk with energy busting from every pore, and though their songs could hardly be called tight or consistent, they're at least fun, and excite a solid crowd of kids looking for any excuse to throw their bodies around.

Jeremy Neale opens with his first single Winter Was The Time, and it's interesting throughout the set to see how much his sound is evolving. Playing a bunch of songs from his soon-to-be-released EP, there's a darker, more melancholy edge to some of these songs, though still grounded in Neale's obvious love and talent for pop music. The band finish with the knock out triple combo of Darlin', A Love Affair To Keep You There and In Stranger Times.

The Red Lights are a Melbourne band who play very tight, squeaky clean indie rock music with precision, but not a whole lot of enthusiasm. Their strongest songs come late in the set when they let themselves go a little more ragged.

Emerson Snowe singer Jarrod Mahon has almost completely lost his voice, and is obviously pretty bummed about it. However, it's a credit to the band that they still put on a great set of new wave British-inspired indie rock, driven by an almost danceable (okay, sway-head-noddable) sense of groove thanks to a formidable rhythm section in Adrian Price and James Wright. Mahon gets through the set admirably by wisely leaving the high notes to the crowd.