0.42.3 - Tell Them How The Crowds Went Wild
Well, if you are keeping a running list of all my various neuroses I have shared on the pages of this blog, here's another minor one for the file. I went through a period of about four or five years in the pre-COVID times of discovering a band and getting very into their music, then a few weeks in I check to see if they are touring only to find that they played a venue 15 minutes from my front door two weeks prior and then they proceed to never tour again/break up or things to that effect. With that in mind, I've trained myself now to recognise when I have reached a point where I like a band enough to want to see them live (which can be very early in the process of discovering their music) to immediately scour the live music listings for their name.
When flipturn released Shadowglow they never toured in Europe on the back of that album; they were new, finding an audience, and touring is expensive. But with Burnout Days came international tour dates for the first time, and my search for live dates coincided with their announcement, letting me camp on the Manchester Academy website at the appropriate time and secure two tickets for November the 7th, 2025. And so, at the end of a particularly brutal week at work, I finished up, grabbed Catherine, and we drive across the Pennines in rush hour traffic to see a band I'd been excited to see for ten calendar months.
Supporting flipturn were Colony House, another band I was unfamiliar with, but in keeping with this years run of excellent support acts accompanying the headline artists, they performed the incredible feat of winning over a crowd who I am certain had no idea who they were before they came on stage. Describing themselves as "Tennessee Surf Rock" they immediately got my attention and won me over when they opened with the title track from their album The Cannonballers which unapologetically starts with a bassline that sounds straight out of a 1970's Hanna Barbera cartoon (or, I guess, more accurately the 1950's surf rock of Dick Dale and his ilk which is where the cartoons stole it from) and transitions between that beach vibe and a kind of britpoppy feel which puts me in mind of Stereophonics or bands like The Seahorses. Seriously, if you don't listen to anything else from this article, this song is well worth your time if only for the compelling style swings it pulls off.
With just forty minutes to work with, Colony House got the audience dancing, clapping and Freddy Mercury style call-and-response singing, as well as filling the tiny stage with incredible energy that kept everyone in the audience fully focused on having a good time. Its one of the truly great support performances I've seen, something you can only manage I guess if you have full confidence than your live music and performance is going to bring the energy that lifts the crowd up to meet you. The day after we saw them, I listened to both The Cannonballers, their 2023 album, and Leave What's Lost Behind from 2020, which turned out to be a far more introspective and low energy album that I was ancitipating, though still pleasant in its own way. They do have a 2025 album called 77 (pt.1) but they are doing the Metric thing of releasing two halves of a double album separately, with 77 (pt. 2) scheduled for release in February next year, at which point I'll make a point of listening to them both. But honestly, getting Colony House as a support for flipturn was a true bargain because between the power of the performance and the energy of their music, I'd spring for a ticket to see them headlining somewhere in the future.
I've seen some all time great gigs inside the cramped sweaty halls of Manchester Academy let me tell you.
With the crowd truly warm, flipturn came on, took that crowd, and dragged them through a rollercoaster set which had every member of the audience vibrating by the end of it. When they played August from their Citrona EP (which I have listened to a bunch, but its not an album so doesn't count for this) and the crowd as one sang the chorus back at the stage, lead singer Dillon Basse just reeled back from the microphone and shouted "Fuck yes", taking in the fact that somehow across thousands of miles of ocean, enough people knew their music to want to be a part of it in that moment. It was great.
I've been struggling with how to describe flipturn's music and what it is about it I find so appealing; seeing them live - where the energy is higher, the songs more visceral and immediate than the studio recordings (which can feel a little winsome at times before descending into a crescendo of chaos) - unlocked the key to their appeal to me. I've talked before about my enjoyment of Post-Rock, the instrumental multi-guitar genre which spawned the band Explosions In The Sky; a band who write melodic, crescendo-rising musical pieces which combine guitar, synth and complex drums into a wall of beautiful noise.
Well, flipturn have taken that formula, and added an emotional vocal layer over the top of it, filling that abstraction with meaning and narrative. Their songs, their entire setlist was a series of carefully orchestrated crescendos, peaking and backing off, swelling to an explosion of layered guitar sounds and a rhythm section so present I could feel it making the floor beneath my feet vibrate. Their two full albums, both Shadowglow and this years Burnout Days ride that same gathering momentum in a way that I find just as emotionally fulfilling as I did seeing them live.
I'm incredibly thankful for the collection of new and exciting bands doing this as bought me into contact with. Not everything has always landed the way I wanted it to, but when it has, it's stuck with me like glue. If you are in Bristol, London or Leeds next week and you want to see a truly excellent band who feel bound for bigger things, run, don't walk to your nearest ticket office.
You can thank me later.
* look, its been a long time since I moaned about bands branding themselves with incorrect capitalisation but here we are again. Please stop, you are killing me.
