Hearts Under Fire / Swim Good / Fallow Fields / Rival Empires [Live Review – The Boileroom, Guildford, 6/11/14]
2014 has been a good year for awesome album launches at the Boileroom. This time around, opening act Rival Empires lived up to expectations by delivering a strong set backed up with energetic stage presence and buckets of passion. Current TMMP favourite If I Was A Whale (prefaced by a short grammatical debate as kicked off here) sounds epic live, overshadowing the inevitable Paramore comparisons with nostalgic reminders of how good Lostprophets were before Ian Watkins started touching kids. It’s all about the clean sections in that tune, while elsewhere we got unexpectedly brutal riffs and shades of the Foo Fighters and Incubus. Add to that some solid musicianship and a guitarist capable of throwing up the devil horns mid-riff without missing a subdivision, and you have a brilliant up and coming British band. Read more…
I’m not sure if it’s too early to compare a band to Lostprophets, but I’m going to do it anyway. Until recently, that band was one of my favourite acts ever; regardless of what was cool at the time, Lostprophets were always able to blend it all into a fresh sound with a unique edge. Tigers Of Junction Street do much the same thing – and it’s completely won me over. 
As far as I can remember, I’ve never reviewed a tune twice here on TMMP. But I’m doing it now. Why? Because even though I