TROPHY EYES // My Chemical Push Pit

Trophy Eyes
with The Hard Aches + Trash Boat + Rumours
Metro Theatre, Sydney
Friday 25th August, 2017

There’s no doubt about it: Chemical Miracle is a bonafide masterpiece. It’s the kind of album that completely transcends expectation, even when you’ve already doled it a couple dozen spins. It’s the kind of album that will, in time, find itself enough cultish adoration that its inevitable anniversary tour will usher Trophy Eyes to arena stages.

For tonight, at least, the Novocastrian quintet stand afront their biggest headline audience to date, clocking in at 1,000 restless emo devouts. When the haunting first bass notes of Home Is ring through a misty sold-out Metro Theatre, shivers trickle down us. We can’t help it—there’s such a gripping poise to Jeremy Winchester’s stringwork, a hair-raising echo to Callum Cramp’s cymbal taps and such implacable potency in John Floreani’s silky, almost slurred opening vocals that when the cut kicks in abruptly and the strobes start pumping, so too does this horde of teenage angst burst to life in a fit of feverish energy. In only the best possible way, this set is going to be fucked.

The mix is near perfect when Trophy Eyes take to the stage, but a few hours earlier, the same most certainly can’t be said for local pop-punks Rumours. The poor blokes are a discordant mess in their first few songs, frontman Luke Hughes entirely buried under a jarring hash of sour buzz and haphazard drum clatter. It all comes together after a short while, though, and come the time they drop into the melodic Worse, Then Better (fitting title, hey?), the four-piece are an indomitable force pounding out a swarm of slick and swervy bangers. Hughes has the ever-expanding crowd in his palm, tying infectiously sharp lyrical quips with punchy, rhythmic strumming. His vocals are loose and slink with a whiny spark à la Modern Baseball, but met with the driving intensity of his bandmates’ playing, they come off more searing than soft. Cuts from the recent Your Taste For Life EP show that Rumours are steadily unfurling a sound all of their own—but ultimately, it’s the buoyant pop-punk digs of last year’s anthemic Clutch that has punters truly losing their shit.

It takes five, maybe ten seconds of Trash Boat‘s breakneck-paced calamity for bodies to start toppling over the barrier in droves. The easycore crushers brought the house down at their own club show a few nights prior, and with only 30 minutes to their name tonight, they condense all of that raw, riotous emotion into a chant-heavy onslaught of jams the unbeknownst could mistake for being a headline set. Powerfully incarnated are the snarling riffs and strained lyricisms explored on their debut LP, Nothing I Write You Can Change What You’ve Been Through—vocalist Tobi Duncan darts around the stage, pouring every ounce of his energy and anguish into the mic; it seems as if at any given moment, he might collapse from the pressure he inflicts on himself. But he never does. He never fucking does. That same uncompromising spirit translates to guitarist Dann Bostock, who spends most of the set one-upping fellow axeman Ryan Hyslop with his impassioned shredding and olympic-class punk jumps.

Trash boat // By Pat O’Hara

The Hard Aches are a little more lowkey, battering out a sticky sweet arsenal of tight and temperate anthems that skew closer to ‘pop’ than ‘punk’. That’s not to say their ardour is muted in comparison to their contemporaries; with booming choruses that cry for raised ankles, the duo make it more than easy for our overhyped mates in the pit to go awol. Obvious highlights come in fan faves I Get Like This and Glad That You’re Gone, but a new, currently untitled tune (we’ll dub it Hey Man) has our collective jaws drop swiftly to the ground with a bright, yet melancholic hook and lyrics that cut deep with their impact. Where every other band on tonight’s bill distribute their eye candy diplomatically, all focus here is on vocalist/guitarist Ben David. And sans a mid-set rant about how crowdsurfers are dickheads—which we agree with, but the mostly teenage (see: rambunctious as fuck) crowd isn’t having but a bar of—he did a bang up job of keeping our eyes locked on his fretting hands. With no one else to elevate his doughy, thickly accented vocals, David went absolutely ham on the guitar. It was effective, too, the frontman proving once and for all that bass is about as necessary in punk as kale is in a doughnut.

The Hard Aches // By Pat O’Hara

Thus brings us to what could arguably be described as one of the most powerful sets the Metro could claim home to. Trophy Eyes are fresh off the back of a mental two-month stint slaying festival stages on the Vans Warped Tour, but our homeland heroes seem anything but drained. Floreani is still his usual industrious self—a photographer’s nightmare thrashing restlessly around the stage in a sweaty, screaming blur. In the past year, he’s grown from a lackadaisical punk kid with a microphone to a genuine frontman: for not a second is he ever offbeat, nailing every buttery clean and delirious yell with the kind of proficiency that SingStar would probably read as a cheat code. Banter is toned down in favour of a steady stream of bangers, but when Floreani does address the crowd, everything he has to say feels important. Before the band launch into a spine-rattling duo of Miracle and Suicide Pact, he quiets the room, calls for lighters up high and delivers a speech on the importance of mental health that feels equally heartfelt and deliberated.

Trophy Eyes // By Pat O’Hara

Of course, it’s not just Floreani that has us in a trance state. Andrew Hallett and Kevin Cross are both godlike guitarists, their roaring alloy of chuggy leads and stretchy rhythm lines melding like cereal and milk with Winchester’s deep, punishing basslines. Though they’re undoubtedly as loose and as lost in their own moment as ever, there’s a newfound theatrical edge to the way Trophy Eyes compose themselves onstage; the songs are a lot tighter and gel with more tactfulness than they have on past tours, and rather than just bulldoze through them in a haze of gory glory, the band are committed to instead using them as a base to put on a proper show.

Trophy Eyes // By Pat O’Hara

Chemical Miracle is shown the full and unbridled appreciation it deserves, with all but the semi-instrumental Chemical given a spin. Early cuts Counting Sheep and Nose Bleed (played as God intended: back to back) define the set at large, both sporting verses clearly designed to spur circle pits and choruses impossible not to scream along to. And while the new tunes all shine with even more venomous grandeur than they do on tape, earlier gems like Bandaid and Tired Hearts feel perfectly at home stacked alongside them. The crowning moment of the set comes in a slow burning run-through of Daydreamer, which starts acoustically and ends with a dazzling crescendo flourished with an eruption of CO2 and confetti—a packed room of fellow broken hearts belting along with Floreani in deafening elation. It’s with confidence that we say this is far from the biggest tour Trophy Eyes will bear their name on; it is, however, a glowing sign of their evolution to come—one that we’re bloody stoked to keep watching unfold.

Trophy Eyes // By Pat O’Hara

Trophy Eyes are still on the road! Catch them on one of the last few Home Is Australia dates (if you’ve already scored tickets, ‘cause uh, these babies are SOLD OUT!):

Saturday September 2nd – Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Sunday September 3rd – Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC