LIVE REVIEW: Mayday Parade @ The Marble Factory, Bristol
As we enter into a well-earned four-day weekend, Bristol’s alternative music fans file into the delightfully divey Marble Factory for a night of heart-string-pulling pop-punk from three stalwarts of the genre; MAYDAY PARADE, REAL FRIENDS and AS IT IS.
Transatlantic emo revivalists AS IT IS are first on the bill tonight, and you couldn’t have picked a better band to bridge the gap between the elder emos and the younglings. The quartet are unashamedly sincere, so much so that it borders on cheesy, but their fans don’t mind one bit. Their enthusiasm is infectious and they’ve got the tunes to back it up. The Wounded World is a powerful opener, while Hey Rachel, arguably the best pop song the group have written, gets the whole crowd bouncing. The openers finish with Dial Tones, leaving the crowd hungry for more – headline tour soon, please!
Rating: 8/10
Chicago emotional pop-punkers REAL FRIENDS are up next. This is the band’s first UK tour since the departure of frontman Dan Lambton in 2020 but new singer Cody Muraro seems well up to the task. He belts out past hits and new tracks with the appropriate passion, despite not having as distinctive a voice as the original frontman.
The band wisely starts off with two tracks from the well-received 2018 album Composure, before dropping in Storyteller off their 2021 EP Torn In Two. The newer song draws a more tepid reaction, as is to be expected, especially given its slower tempo. Any old fans are drawn out with a huge sing-along for I’ve Given Up On You and newer track Nervous Wreck does better following up that old favourite. Late Nights In My Car and From The Outside get the whole crowd moving, truly bringing excitement for tonight’s headliner to its peak.
Rating: 7/10
While they might not have reached the heights of popularity as some of their noughties contemporaries, there’s a good reason that Floridian power pop band MAYDAY PARADE have stood the test of time – because they write damn fine songs. Tonight’s setlist isn’t full of surprises due to the fact the show is a part of the 11th Anniversary Tour for their self-titled album but the audience know what they came for and eat it up all the same.
The record’s opener, Oh Well, Oh Well is the perfect song to kickstart the show, with its chorus (“oh well, oh well, guess I’ll see you in hell”) raising just about every voice in the venue. Feeding off the adoration of Bristol’s elder emo crowd, the band gives a spectacular performance that makes it hard to believe the songs are more than a decade old.
Derek Sanders’ sparkling vocals are flawless, shining particularly brightly on the heart-wrenching piano-led ballad Stay. There is a lull in the latter half of the album, which can often be the case in full-album playthroughs, but the energy picks up again nicely for the closer Happy Endings Are Stories That Haven’t Ended Yet.
After the record playthrough is finished, the band return to the stage to perform some fan favourites from the rest of their discography, starting with Kids of Summer from 2021’s What It Means To Fall Apart. Then the nostalgia is turned up to 11 with two of their biggest hits – Jersey and Jamie All Over. The only noticeable omission from tonight’s tracklist is breakup anthem Miserable At Best which may have been cut for time or to save the energy being sapped by another ballad. Either way, its absence is a shame. This small disappointment aside, it’s a triumphant evening for a band who clearly haven’t been dampened by age.
Rating: 8/10
Check out our photo gallery of the night’s action in Bristol from Serena Hill Photography here:
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