You’d think that playing The Attic was reserved for bands that haven’t quite made it yet. The baby sister of The Garage, I’d believe you if you told me it was smaller than the Catty. Every so often, you do get a gem passing through one of the most intimate venues in Glasgow and tonight it would have been the turn of Nashville emo punks Free Throw – but the public had their say and it was upgraded to G2 and still sold out.
What we gain in capacity, we lose in visibility as pillars placed everywhere up to and including on the stage get in the way. Understandably, there’s a bit of a buzz around the show thanks to this along with two supports with great followings. So despite my venue misgivings, still excited to be here.
The opener is Eat Defeat who take to the stage and hour after doors open, which makes the half six start a bit baffling. These guys have been on the go for some time and have shared the stage with some real mainstays of the genre. Being more skate/pop punk than anything else, they’ve got buckets of energy and it’s hard to see how they couldn’t please anyone into the early ’00s flavour of the genre. The vocalist also has a bit of a northern twang a la Frank Turner which always goes down well. Really good fast skate punk with good circle pits and great cartwheels. Good skate punk is hard to find in this day and age and I’d gladly listen to a full headline slot of these guys.
The main support is Saturdays at Your Place. A Michigan-based Emo Pop Punk band that falls on the table around the likes of Mom Jeans and Modern Baseball with the tiniest bit of math riffs showing through. The lead vocals duties are shared amongst the trio, which can be a bit of a mystery when it’s the drummer’s turn (like the first song of the set) and you can’t tell where the voices are coming from. A common problem in my life nowadays. The bassist and guitarist have the price tags still hanging from their headstocks which – and I have no idea why – kinda irks me.
The banter from bassist (I can’t find their names anywhere) is a bit Napoleon Dynamite… awkward and full of charm. I found myself liking these guys a lot more than I thought I would. Definitely better live than on the records. By the end of the set there’s not only a circle pit and some ambitious crowd surfers, but death-defying stage divers too. I keep saying we need more of that at shows and I’ll never stop saying it. These guys need to get on a stage with the likes of Hot Mulligan soon.
Free Throw come on stage and launch into something a lot fiercer than you hear on the recordings. The music of American Football with the vocals of Hot Water Music. The immediate response is excitement and exhilaration in the crowd. Cory Castro is absolutely on fire with his vocal work whilst simultaneously playing finger tapped riffs on guitar. The stage is thick with fog – more so than with the other acts, but that doesn’t take away from the show. As it’s a small stage and there’s no room for massive moves by the five piece, the excess smoke masks the forced lack of movement.
The set moves along quite quickly but that’s a good thing as all too often, mid western songs can tend to drag out. What Free Throw have done here is bring the hardcore punk side of things to the mid western emo genre better than most other bands have done. It’s the recordings more pissed off and more vicious, and when you throw in a crowd who get to throw themselves off a stage to it – you can’t go wrong. I almost wish that Free Throw stick to small venues so they don’t loose this degree of participation.
This was a sweatbox gig with some remarkable bands that are shockingly good – even if you go expecting them to be great. The only sad bit is that gigs this good are few and far between. Hopefully it won’t be long before the next one.
Photos by Catching Light Photography
- The Early November / Mark Rose - 27 January 2025
- Tom Meighan / The Capollos - 16 December 2024
- Me First And The Gimme Gimmes - 9 December 2024