Funeral For A Friend
The Welsh post-hardcore titans have been around for almost ten years now and in the process have become an undeniably seminal band in the shaping of what the rock scene has become today, with most younger bands here this weekend, even as high up the bill as We Are The Ocean, being evidently influenced by their unique sound. The feeling therefore that their evening set is something rather special is a fact that should come with no surprise at all. Roaring onto stage with a heel-snapping 'The End Of Nothing', the quintet show exactly how it's done, pulling what is inarguably the biggest crowd of the whole weekend (essentially everyone's watching them), creating an absolutely deafening sing-a-long for songs from 2003 to today and looking like they wouldn't want to be anywhere else in the world but on that stage. The band are tighter than they've been in a long time and every member feels like a powerful piece of the FFAF puzzle and the sound is pleasantly and surprisingly perfect, no sound issues to be heard here, frontman Matt Davies sounds brilliant as a result with endearing and often hilarious banter between songs. It's a telling sign that new songs like 'Broken Foundation' and 'Spinning Over The Island' go down just as well as older classics like the now ten-year old 'Juneau' (possibly the biggest sing-a-long of the weekend) and everything sounds right alongside each other. A particularly moving 'Roses For The Dead', an ode to anyone who's ever lost anyone in their lives, provides one of the true moments of the weekend and throwing in once lesser played cuts such as 'Red Is The New Black' causes hysteria. Euphoric cries from the audience throughout the set only add to the sense of occasion and give the feeling that everyone is at one, both band and audience, a celebration of music lovers coming together both on stage and off. Finishing with an incendiary 'Escape Artists Never Die', the subsequent chants of 'FU-NE-RAL' are just as loud as the sing-a-longs preceding them, Funeral stole the weekend with true fire and proved just how important they are in a world full of posers. Real band, real music.
Check out our interview with guitarist Gav Burrough just before the band's set here http://www.roomthirteen.com/cgi-bin/feature_view.cgi?FeatureID=878&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter