No time of year suits emo quite as well as December. There’s a general sense of things ending, it’s dark before four, and you finally have an excuse to layer up all your band merch.
Manchester played witness to this as 2600 people wrapped denim jackets over flannel shirts, over band hoodies, and descended on Manchester Academy to see The Front Bottoms in action.
Support came from Vundabar, a last-minute addition to the tour, who walked out to an already full-voiced crowd enjoying ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ over the PA. Frontman Brandon Hagen’s guitar strung high around his chest, Zack Abramo’s bass slung low, the Boston three-piece’s high fuzz alt-rock shook any frost from the bones of the audience.
Galloping through songs, Drew McDonald set the pace from the back on drums. Always animated, he was as much a conductor for the crowd as a metronome for his bandmates, letting fills fly across his toms and leading the audience in clap-alongs. Punching bass interlocked with spirited drums and overdriven guitar, either grooving low or piercing up high. The Academy morphed into a garage jam session, its highlight being the band’s unexpected TikTok hit ‘Alien Blues’. Gritty, pessimistic, and yelled back at the stage by the audience’s younger sections, this gave a glimpse of what was to come.
Twenty minutes, two Christmas songs, and a whole-crowd belting of ‘Wannabe’ later, the lights dimmed and The Front Bottoms took to the stage. Expanded from the two-man core of childhood friends Brian Sella (guitar, vocals) and Matthew Uychich (drums) to a five-piece touring outfit, rain sounds crackled over the speakers as they found their places. The rain continued, building tension like a riser, augmented by the murmurs of friends in the crowd guessing which song would be first, until it was all cut with one chord and one question: “Is it raining where you are?”
With this first line of ‘West Virginia’, Sella captured every person in the venue and did not intend to let them go. From this moment on the crowd matched his every syllable for the next 90 minutes. Stood amid a roaring Academy, it was hard to imagine much louder than the volume at which we sang back the ‘West Virginia’ chorus, but the cheer let out at his localised rewording – “This is for all my friends in Manchester” – did the job. When an audience loves you, sometimes the easiest crowd work is all you need.
Having walked out in a blazer and a turtleneck, a faux lounge band aesthetic, Sella ditched the blazer after three songs, its pretence at propriety no match for the raw emotion being pelted back at him from below. Headbanging his initially sculpted hair out of shape, too, the evening tracked his willing descent from neat band-leader to dishevelled rockstar as sweat, pain, regret, and love saturated the room.
The Academy was saturated sonically, too, as The Front Bottoms’ classically lo-fi sound expanded by the keyboards of Roshane Karunaratne, AJ Peacox’s bright and uncompromising electric guitar, and Natalie Newbold’s bass. Enhancing more than just the aural experience, Newbold was happy to play up to the crowd, holding her red Mustang bass aloft and thumping its body in time to Uychich’s kick drum, a rhythm section that demanded attention.
The 20-song set spanned all 12 years of Front Bottoms releases, plumbing the depths of emotion. ‘Paris’, from this year’s You Are Who You Hang Out With, saw Imogen Heap-eqsue autotune bleed over Sella’s struggles communicating with loved ones. ‘Peach’ allowed an interlude of genuine, knowingly cheesy love amidst the angst. ‘Father’ brought to bear the kind of violent regret and simmering hate that only songs about family can. The final song before the encore, the brilliantly tongue-in-cheek ‘Au Revoir (Adios)’, got a rise as big as any. Wherever The Front Bottoms went, two and a half thousand voices followed.
To close, Sella returned for the encore alone for a vulnerable rendition of ‘12 Feet Deep’, no match for the volume of the crowd on his own before his band arrived as reinforcements for ‘Twin Size Mattress’, an angry lament on lost love tantamount to emo alt-rock gospel.
Mancunian voices matching Brian’s New Jersey rhoticity one last time over a chorus that, now a decade old, is proving increasingly timeless. Being “cursed forever” to go to gigs like these with crowds like these felt like nothing but a privilege.
