The Globe, Cardiff, Mon 12 Dec
Every Time I Die have a knack, well mastered after nearly 20 years together, of inspiring jaw-dropping lunacy in a live setting. Tonight this is typified by the queue of people lining up to throw themselves from the 12ft high speaker stacks into the swirling morass of a moshpit, whipped up by a rolling programme of breakdowns delivered by the Buffalo outfit onstage. Or it would have been, had such feats of Monday night madness not been eclipsed by perhaps the most swivel-eyed of ETID’s Welsh fanbase, who takes it upon himself to dive from the balcony, into the heaving, sweating, perpetual-motion experiment below.
The response from the stage is laughter, encouragement and birthday cake (not one, but two members of ETID are celebrating tonight) presented to the grasping audience by frontman Keith Buckley and swiftly howitzered into the pit, which explodes once again as the band launch into the southern-fried, half-time twang of It Remembers, one of many cuts from latest release, Low Teens, aired tonight. The new album is an undoubted high-point in the band’s recent career and material from it sits well in the set alongside classics from their back-catalogue, like The New Black and Floater, the latter of which ramps the energy up to frankly unbelievable levels.
Support acts for such a well loved and formidably impressive live act as ETID are always going to have their work cut out for them, but ‘68 and Drug Church between them have decades of experience, cultivated in related projects Norma Jean and Self-Defense Family respectively, and charisma to spare. Both elicit warm response from an audience which turns white hot the moment tonight’s headliners bound onstage, dishing out handshakes and high-fives.
The energy levels both onstage and off do not dip below frantic at any point during a set that feels both triumphantly special, yet also business as usual for a band who’ve made an artform of eliciting mania in their fanbase.
words and photos HUGH RUSSELL