By Jase Walker
It’s amazing how spotting a cool looking band logo on your mate’s suitcase at the airport can lead you to finding a pretty good band randomly. In this case it’s Halflives. Admittedly I’ve found bands through weirder circumstances but in this case, I found a fun, bouncy pop rock band from Italy that immediately hooked me.
Back for another stomp around Europe after their run with Cadet Carter last year that I was fortunate to catch on the Haarlem stop, Halflives are in Melkweg’s UP stage tonight on the rough midpoint of the tour. In cases of bands playing this venue, it’s fairly common to run without support which is how it’s going tonight, it’s all about Halflives. As you can probably expect this may be a bit of a shorter read compared to the usual 3/4 band bills.
Using Paramore’s ‘Ain’t It Fun’, and Avril Lavigne’s ‘sk8r boi’, as leading tracks prior to them taking the stage, I’m quite excited to see another room full of people bouncing around to Halflives.
The stage pulses with white lighting as the first members get on stage and get the crowd clapping along. Linda jumps up on stage to loud applause and the show’s properly going now, although it seems people don’t quite know the words for the new EP just yet but this doesn’t seem to faze her much. The stage set up with a large Roman II with a split heart in the middle of it is a nice touch for driving the main lighting tone is a nice touch along with the various plants and vibes on the mic stands. Personally, I think it’s a nice touch when bands bring a bit of identity to their stage layouts; it’s not everyone’s thing but I appreciate it a lot.
After some of the newer material it’s time to dig a bit further back and the band immediately gets a stronger reaction as people start singing along with much more confidence. ‘Snake’ ramps it up with people getting more into it and dancing around but it’s still early in the set and the big guns are no doubt stacked up at the back.
Linda uses’ Snake’ to make the band’s guitar/bass player play along with some antics too, adding a bit of theatrical flair to the set. She’s clearly having a ton of fun doing this, artists that are really into what they’re doing fully add to the enjoyment of a show.
“Emo was never a phase” she remarks as she introduces ‘Perfectly Broken’ from the EP, little wonder Halflives led with Paramore and Avril before the show started. There’s some real.strong influences of Blink 182 in this song, a legitimately fun, bouncy pop punk banger that I can see taking Halflives pretty far!
Can’t go without getting people to shine their phone torches these days when singing a ballad though eh? ‘Oblivion’ sees the audience gladly waving them around to support Linda with her request for a sea of stars. They kick off ‘Vibe’ with Linda marching into the middle of the crowd and absolutely scaring the living daylights out of me by suddenly appearing next to me out of nowhere.
Linda asks for a run through the days of the week in Dutch and gets a bit of a lukewarm response asking “oh, it’s just like German then?”. Yeah, maybe don’t do that. Anyway, it doesn’t spoil the vibe much for ‘Rockstar Everyday’. We’re definitely in the home run of songs now considering how we’re running straight through a slew of high energy songs and the crowd is shouting the words back louder than ever. I do hope we’ve got at least a couple more in the encore and as it seems, the baying crowd agrees and refuses to leave.
Linda returns to great applause and gives a quick introduction of the encore spoiling the crowd with three and leading with ‘Permanent Damage’ from the new EP. And finally finishing with ‘Victim’ and ‘Immortals’ which as it seems, looks like everyone here was waiting on these songs being somewhere in the set going off the flailing arms and emotional looks on everyone’s faces while shouting the words right back at the band.
Overall Halflives have been a great show once again and stand to be one of the most underrated European pop rock bands around. There’s little pretense or complication with them, it’s just straight up good fun with solid melodic hooks and memorable lyrics. See you again next time, I’ll be there without a doubt.
- PHOTO CREDIT: Photo © Bácsfalvi Lilla Photo.