Live Review: Jebediah

Anniversary tours seem to be the cool thing of the moment for '90s bands that have hit the 20-year milestone. Last year was flooded with them and everyone was filled with grunge and indie nostalgia that seems to have flowed into 2015, giving Jebediah the chance to seize their moment. They made their final stop of their tour in Tasmania. 

Rather than an exercise in cashing in on a trend, however, Jebediah seemed to be giving their music to the crowd with generosity and in return they were really enjoying themselves. This wasn't a band that seemed tired or struggling to remember the old stuff. Their energy and rock-solid performance skills would be hard to match from any other band. Kevin Mitchell's unique vocal sound was just as raw and intense as when the band first hit the airwaves back in 1995.

So how do you sell out three nights in a row in Hobart? You give the punters exactly what they're after. The first set was an exercise in getting all the amazing hits post-1997 and cramming them into an hour. Heavily featured were tracks from the stunning Of Some Day Shambles album from 1999, with gut-wrenching but beautiful highlights like Please Leave and Feet Touch The Ground giving the crowd a flashback to their own angst-filled teenage heartbreaks and the soundtrack that accompanied them.

The second set, after a respectful and generous interval, was an hour or so in during which Jebediah invited the crowd to jump into their very own time machine and land in 1997 to experience from start to finish the seminal late-'90s album Slightly Odway. Each song flowed into the next seamlessly with shrieks of happiness from the crowd once they recognised their favourites from a catchy guitar riff.

Some less popular tracks from the album were the surprising highlights of the night with the aid of the time machine, the crowd shocking themselves by knowing every lyric to songs like Jerks Of Attention and Benedict.

The encore felt like an afterthought once Slightly Odway was over. Jebediah had given us everything and we had landed abruptly back in 2015 and no one was happy about it. You have to wonder, after a show like this, who will be celebrating in their anniversary in 20 years' time? Will Hobartians sell out shows at the Republic for a band they had loved 20 years before then? Let's hope so. It was a treat.