Even if this is my third live review of sorts since I picked this blog back up from the almost-dead over the summer, there is still something utterly unbelievable, in a magical kind of way, about being back at in-person shows. It seems too good to be true and, as we have seen through many tours being postponed and shows being cancelled over COVID cases in bands' teams, it still feels like it's all hanging by a thread, more fragile than ever. Yes, we do have live music back, for now, and it is something to be celebrated, and we are lucky enough to see bands travel from overseas to play, but now is not the time to take anything for granted.
Now is the time to love it with all our hearts, like we've never loved anything before, and appreciate it more than ever.
This time last week, I flew to London, England, without a three-hour stopover in Barcelona, Spain, like I had for Slam Dunk, to watch All Time Low play Brixton Academy. Back when I first started listening to the Baltimore pop-punks, about twelve years ago, I remember the idea of Brixton Academy being such a milestone for artists. If you played Brixton Academy, in some way, you had made it. I remember seeing people I knew travelling to the United Kingdom and watching bands play there, and it all seemed like something unattainable, the Royal Albert Hall of pop-punk kids, if you will. The first time I ever attended a show in the iconic venue was in February of 2011, when I bought seating tickets to see A Day To Remember, only because their Paris show was sold out. Still a baby in these corners of the scene, I assumed that, if they were playing a three-hundred-people capacity room in Paris, the show in London must have been roughly the same size. Despite Brixton Academy holding magic and power over the scene I was diving into, I had no idea how many people it could contain, and I suppose you can imagine my surprise when I turned up for doors, and the queue was going all the way around the block.
Since then, I have seen many bands in this legendary building, all lovely white statues and sloped standing area, but never All Time Low, despite them playing it regularly. When they announced a UK tour, no European Union shows, I knew I wanted to attend but refused to plan anything because of the potential travel restrictions. And when The Maine, who I absolutely adore, was announced as the main support act, I knew I needed to be there- a true come hell or high water situation. There was no way I could miss that tour.
The first night saw the largest queue I remember seeing in front of Brixton Academy since my first ever show there, a decade prior. As a consequence, though I cannot fault venue staff for their quick and efficient work, we missed the first song and a half played by East coast band Meet Me At The Altar. I had heard of them thanks to their ties with The Wonder Years' frontman Dan Campbell, and I first checked out their single Garden sometime in 2020, including it in a sadly short-lived "positive energy" playlist situation I had on Twitter. After releasing the excellent EP Model Citizen in the summer of 2021, I grew even more excited to watch them perform live, and these first two times did not disappoint in the slightest- quite the contrary, actually. There is such a quiet confidence exuding from these women, as if they know it's within their power to hold a five-thousand-people strong audience in the palm of their hand, which I hope they did. How could they not? They have too much charisma to leave anyone indifferent, and the scene needs a voice like theirs too badly to ignore them. While they played the UK, last week, I saw many people praising them and calling them important, and you know what, yes, they really are. I have a memory of me saying, about Candy Hearts/Best Ex, that had I found music like it when I was younger, I would have held on to it and never let go, I would have grown obsessed with it and modelled my entire personality around it, and the same goes for Meet Me At The Altar. Teenage me would have adored them with all her heart, and it's only natural that adult me, even more so with all the education and views on the world I now have, is on that path. I left Brixton Academy even more of a fan than I was before I walked in, and I am unbelievably excited to see them again at Slam Dunk Festival in June. (If there is any way we could get Feel It Again with Dan Campbell, that would be lovely, thank you.)
Also, realistically, how could I not love a band that covers Jimmy Eat World's Sweetness? That was a match made in heaven.
In the past fourteen years, The Maine, "spelled like the state, from Phoenix, Arizona," has grown into a band that is universally loved and completely underrated at the same time. They have one of the biggest and most dedicated communities of fans I have ever seen, but rarely will you ever see anyone celebrate them as a must-check out band or cite their albums as staples of the genre- and it is through no fault of their own. I have always admired The Maine because they seem to do whatever it is they want to do without worrying whether it will be accepted by their peers. They played a free tour in the United States, back in 2015. They tour with every band, newcomers and old friends alike. They reinvent themselves with every album without shouting on rooftops that they are evolving or changing. They wear matching outfits on stage and radiate a chaotic energy that feels completely genuine. The Maine just exist. They do their thing, follow their own path, away from labels and clichés, away from tropes and traps, and it is why they are this loved.
The best thing about watching The Maine play on a stage is that you never really know what to expect apart from a great performance given by the five men on stage. It's a given when I go see them live: I know I will never, ever be disappointed, and I know they always deliver. Maybe it's why I have never hesitated before buying tickets to their tours, maybe it's why I have now seen them live twenty-four times, maybe it's why I keep coming back for more with no signs of stopping. I know they are going to be absolutely brilliant.
I just never know what's going to happen to me in the crowd.
After about two songs of quiet dad-dancing on the side, the first night, we grow restless and decide to shake things up in the middle of the audience, which results in a three-woman moshpit, which then grows into a five-woman moshpit. (Side note, but Brixton Academy and its fifty-five thousand barriers scattered all over the standing area makes it hard to start some action of the pitting kind sometimes.) On the second time, the crowd seems a little more active, and I find myself being the first crowdsurfer of the show. The sense of uncertainty and jumping into the unknown whenever I watch The Maine means everything to me. This joyful chaos keeps me excited and eager for the next show. Mark my words: I will always be impatient for my next The Maine show.
Their Brixton setlist is a solid mixture of their biggest, most-known songs (Numb Without You, Am I Pretty?, or Black Butterflies And Déjà Vu) and tracks extracted from their latest record, 2021's XOXO: From Love And Anxiety In Real Time. "If you don't know the words, pretend like you do!" enthusiastically exclaims frontman John O'Callaghan, the leader of all this chaos. And we all do. We wave our arms about, we sing along as best as we can, we dad dance like it's our neighbour's barbecue and we have had one too many beers, we scream "Yeehaw!" when prompted, because why the hell not, and we are lucky enough to watch a band that I have followed almost religiously for the past twelve years of my life, a band who looks happier than ever, and a band who always makes me leave the room with a stupid grin plastered on my sweaty, glittery face.
And, just as always, I am already excited for the next show, for the next tour, even though I have no bloody clue where or when that may be.
As I spoke about in my albums of the year post, at the end of last year, Wake Up Sunshine is the album that made me fall back in love with All Time Low, after years of drought and music I didn't connect with as much as I used to. It's the album that swept me off my feet all over again and, in some way, the girl who played it on repeat from her little countryside village could almost be the adult version of the university-aged kid who used to listen to Nothing Personal every morning as motivation for classes, minus the awful fringe. (Thank God for that!)
There is always something akin to a celebration whenever you watch All Time Low live and, albums I clicked with or not, the feeling never went away. They would play a song, and I would immediately start dancing and singing, thinking "Shit! I love this one!" every three minutes for an hour and a half. With Wake Up Sunshine tracks in tow, the feeling became heightened. Both nights, because they swapped setlist between both shows, every time a song started, old or new, all I could think about was: "Shit! I love that one!"
You know how, sometimes, you'll watch a band, and they will say something about their new record and how they would please like to play material from it if you don't mind, as if they are asking you for a favour? All Time Low didn't really do any of it tonight, but I wouldn't have cared if they had. I wanted them to play as much stuff from Wake Up Sunshine as possible. I would have had my money's worth if they had played the album from start to end, and back again. Because this was not in the card, we simply got Some Kind Of Disaster, Sleeping In, Monsters (sadly sans blackbear or Demi Lovato), Favourite Place, Clumsy, Glitter & Crimson, as well as the two recent non-album singles that followed, Once In A Lifetime and PMA. The rest of the setlist was largely composed of classics, and let me tell you one thing, nothing compares to hearing five thousand people echoing the opening lines to 2007's Six Feet Under The Stars or watching confetti cascade over the crowd during the iconic Dear Maria, Count Me In.
The first night, during Glitter & Crimson, which frontman Alex Gaskarth said he wrote about a gay couple fighting for their love, I see a group of people holding a pride flag, not far from me, down the front. The second night, a similar flag is thrown on stage, only to be worn by guitarist Jack Barakat as a cape. And there's something that made me so happy about both those sights. Yes, nothing in the world compares to the joy of hearing the songs you love played by the bands who created and crafted them, but most importantly, nothing feels like knowing there are people who have found, in All Time Low, at their shows, a place where they feel safe enough to be who they are, unapologetically, as they should. And I don't think I will ever be able to listen to Glitter & Crimson without thinking of those Brixton shows, now.
There are a million things that have been said about All Time Low's stage presence and performances in the past, and I could only paraphrase the most complimentary. Even when I didn't quite click with their music, I attended every show I could, because they are just that good on a stage, whatever they play. They have an energy that is limitless, that knows no bounds, and the way they communicate with the audience, wherever in the world it is, is natural, never forced, and feels comfortable to witness. They seem to have toned down the dirty, blink-182-like jokes of yesteryear, though people will always throw bras all over the stage, apparently, and they are still the band I fell in love with, back when I was a lost nineteen-year-old kid with no sense of direction or fashion. They are fun, they are like the sunshine, they are full of energy, enthusiasm, and joy, they make you laugh and cry all at once, and now, they have the budget of their big ambitions and confetti and fancy screens behind them on stage, enhancing an already stellar performance. Yeah, maybe that was rude to my feelings to play Therapy and Missing You back to back, please, can I just not cry for a minute, but they were instantly forgiven anyway.
The first night, we end up in the moshpits, tearing it up and, strangely, after about seventeen shows or so, I had never been in the middle. (It took me ten shows to get the barrier I so desperately wanted back in the day, cut me some slack.) And, yeah, maybe some people need to relearn pit etiquette, but it was a fun time regardless. I crowdsurfed to Dear Maria, Count Me In on the first night, and when I landed on the other side of the barrier, running back in the crowd and seeing the confetti fall, I couldn't help but think that teenage me, the girl with nothing going for her, the girl who listened to the same album every day for months on end, the girl who tried to find joy wherever she could, nevermind if it was just stupid boys making basement noise in the basement, yeah, in Baltimore, Maryland, where she's still never been, well, that girl, she would be damn proud of adult me, and at that moment, it was all I cared about.
As I said on Instagram, 2020 sucked, big time, and I don't think we need to be reminded of any of it, but it gave me my stupid love for All Time Low back, and I think I have no choice but to be grateful. The joy I felt inside Brixton Academy, those two nights- I have to be grateful.
