Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Fear is the mother of Hope, without one you cannot have the other, without them both the world makes as much sense as dumping a lorry load of nettle leafs into molten gold and selling the remains to the people of Sark in exchange for the island’s entire bicycle collection. Some things just don’t make sense.
To be in the o2 Academy in Liverpool, to watch a group of musicians give a powerful display of emotion and vocal rage in a set and then find out that they could be about to call it quits because of time constraints is one of the most saddest and maddening things about being a lover of live music. It makes as much sense to the brain as watching gold encrusted nettle leafs become a prized bartering system in the Channel Islands.
For Fear The Resistance, this was probably the finest time to catch them live, even if it was the first time and yet as the five members walked off stage with their heads held high, their instruments aloft as if transporting a newly claimed hero on their shoulders and yet tinged with sadness, loud recriminations from the audience as they filtered the announcement from lead vocalist Laura Kitchen that this was Fear The Resistance’s last gig. College and time seemingly dethroning a band who played with the type of anger that you would want a young band to do!
The final set list may have been full of covers but they were played with guts, with rhythmic fury in which Laura Kitchen’s voice assaulted the heart wonderfully and Jade Cory and Amber Hughes alongside her as two female musicians to not only look up to but to hail as future stars, as future members of the ever growing female rock community in which has mushroomed in the last ten years. With the band being completed by the recent addition of Cameron McCluskey and George Gopsill on bass and rhythm guitar, there really should have been no stopping Fear The Resistance.
With tracks such as You Me At Six’s Bite My Tongue, Good Charlotte’s The River, the bitterness that frames Papa Roach’s Where Did The Angels Go? and 30 Seconds To Mars’ The Kill making this young but blistering band’s set so real that it could apply for citizenship and hold down a job.
It has long been mooted that for a young band to rely completely on covers in their set is something to avoid, there is so much wrong in this world that to see a band play merrily away a track that has not long come out is enough to drive some to despair. However when that band places their own slant on the music, when the lead singer projects so much self-confidence and has a voice in which rage and anger stops in their tracks and slowly backs away, in which the drummer pounds at the skin as if sending out a declaration of war and the young female guitarist plays as if having somehow becoming a young Dave Murray, you have to applaud, and applaud loudly.
If this is the final appearance on stage in this guise for the five members of Fear The Resistance, then the world suddenly feels as empty and void as it ever could.
Ian D. Hall