Live Review: Everything Everything - Roundhouse, London 13/04/2022
Wednesday 13th April — an otherwise unassuming night instead played host to Everything Everything’s explosive headline set in support both of previous album Re-Animator, which didn’t quite get the live airing it deserved, and upcoming Raw Data Feel.
But first, L’Objectif with some classic indie rock to start the night. The Leeds based band gave their all to the steadily growing Camden crowd. Burn Me Out and Get Close seemed to see the band channel their inner dreamy shoe gaze psychedelia, while slightly faster numbers sprinkled throughout gave the set a burst of energy that kept everyone buzzing on the dreary weekday eve.
Final song Drive In Mind, meanwhile, possessed a prevailing bass line and pounding drums that pervaded the amphitheatre-esque room; fluctuating between seethingly dark, delicately bleak, and energetically angsty, those final few minutes left the set a tumultuous, roiling, metaphorical pit; the only thing missing was an actual pit, with the crowd perhaps still a little too shy to truly let loose yet. A fantastic way to open the night.
Phoebe Green was up next, bursting on stage... to some nice, soothing elevator music. That didn’t last long, however, as she burst into the melancholy and sinister Grit. With a little bit of the Smiths oozing from her performance, the Mancunian singer songwriter flits between darkly self-scorning and melodically, danceable decadence over her too-short set.
‘This is a big room’, she gushes, before launching into new song Make It Easy, about getting in your own way; a feat obviously in the past for the singer, what with a slew of support slots with Self Esteem back in March and now acting as one of the main supports for Everything Everything. DIE DIE DIE, shortly after, saw haunting ballad mixed with electronic pop, still tinged with that self-same sense of pseudo nihilism; final song IDK, meanwhile, seemed as much a performance poem as it did a song; “Cyclical occurrences and cynical people/ I can't tell which one of them is making me so evil”, she admits, in spoken word set to music, before breaking into the tense, angst-filled, chorus. A very interesting, introspective, and highly entertaining 30 minutes.
Finally, it’s time for the eclectic, eccentric, and explosive Everything Everything to take to the stage. With five studio albums released and a sixth closely behind, it was almost as exciting to see what they’d choose for their setlist as it was to actually see said setlist in action. And the weighting, if perhaps a little uneven, left little to be desired.
With beaming white lights cascading over the crowd like searchlights, the entry on this l’il live ledger was newly released single Teletype, the opening track of upcoming Raw Data Feel. Before talking about the song, it’s important to highlight just how the actual album works; a lot of the songs were written (particularly lyrically) from lead singer Jonathan Higgs giving A.I access to Beowulf, 4chan and Confucius among others. It’s worrying that it’s not immediately discernible to what degree each song was automated, and what in particular influenced it; either way, each track released as of yet is left even more unique, if such a thing is possible from Everything Everything.
So, Teletype. Teletype started here as an electronically garbled mess, almost glitching it’s way through the first few seconds, before transitioning into a surprisingly warm and wholesome track; the lights beaming behind the five pieces, dressed one and all in white, mirrored electronic bytes of data being transmitted from them to us, and the crowd were instantly enamoured. ‘If this is the big time/ I feel good’, Higgs cried, as the thousands strong Roundhouse hung every word. Yet if Teletype’s welcome can be called warm, Arc’s Cough Cough, following soon after, was rapturous. Strobes flashing across the stage reflected its staccato intro, while the crowd screamed each moment of the refrain in a frenzied attempt to drown out everything else going on; which, given its 2022, is a LOT.
Can’t Do, the only offering this tour from 2017’s A Fever Dream, meanwhile gives the first proper demonstration of just how high Higgs’ vocals go, as he takes on the persona of a sort of anxious protagonist frozen into inaction; a sense followed by Re-Animator’s Arch Enemy. About a worshipped, anthropomorphised, sentient fatberg in a sewer — genuinely — it’s a fantastic exploration of greed and toxicity. And living piles of fat.
Interestingly, any witty back and forth with the crowd was kept to a minimum throughout the night. For a band so often enamoured with exploring human connection and interaction, it seemed an odd choice. Yet it worked perfectly. The band just let the songs do their talking for them. Kemosabe, about feeling alone even when with people, is the perfect example. Any sense of isolated introspection, insular worry, is immediately broken by the sense of togetherness and community that a gig can have. Everyone knew their cues, when to chime in with a well placed ‘NO!’ or ‘Hey!’; everything just felt alive — the perfect time for a new number. The energy already evoked ensured that Jennifer — one of two yet-to-be-released songs played, along with the Domino’s invoking Pizza Boy (what with the red and blue lighting) — was held with the same adoration as all the rest despite having no known lyrics to sing along to. It will do, eventually — a bright and bouncy number, it’s sure to inspire as much love and singing from the crowd as any of the other instant classics from the band — but they’re never the easiest to bring into a set. The Mancunians managed it.
Here, we hit a bit of a lull as more contemplative moments began to emerge. The haunting, ethereal Planets, backlit by purple lights, gave the band an eerie, otherworldly vibe, while the white outfits retroactively took on the guise of spacesuits, venturing forth into this strange new world they’d created; segmented white lights flashing behind seemed like a space ship’s circuit board taking us on the journey with them.
But that’s barely scratching the surface: the lighting throughout was insane. Sure, people say that about a lot of bands, but genuinely. The light often contributed as much to the story of the song as the lyrics themselves; the cascading beams of white light gushing over the crowd during Warm Healer, literally healing the crowd of their gig-less blues; the diamonds flickering in and out of the darkly lit backdrop in Birdsong; the sometimes sanguine soaked, sometimes blinding lights of To The Blade, a sort of flicker between flustered lights and blood drenched nihilism — you can tell it’s a band who have put as much thought into their live *show* as they have their live performance.
From live to lives, now, as the band harked back to their early days with Man Alive’s Photoshop Handsome, a sort of 8-bit tinged exploration of reincarnation that comfortably got the most resounding screams of excitement of the night. Although this marked the start and end of the early numbers, there was still plenty to come. Case in point, another recently released number.
“Thank you for joining us on this Friday night", Higgs remarks, before quickly correcting himself. “Wait, sorry, Saturday night. I keep doing this”. One cheesy intro later, and it’s Bad Friday time. As well as inevitably invoking the idea of Good Friday, Bad Friday is as much of a surreal dance track as it is an exploration of violence and abuse, particularly on a night out: the violent frenzy of thrown limbs from the crowd’s frantic pits seemed to embody both. Yet there’s no rest for the wicked, or at least for Everything Everything fans, as the band immediately broke into Spring/Sun/Winter/Dread. Higgs didn’t even need to sing for the first minute, instead just extending the microphone out, and letting the crowd run loose. A ‘final’ I Want A Love Like This, another recently released snapshot of Raw Data Feel, and the band were ‘finished’.
But for once, the fake end seemed deserved, letting the band take a quick breather before emerging once more and launching into upbeat, Carpe Diem anthem Violent Sun and the bizarre, madcap insanity that is Distant Past, a generational cry that takes ‘Same Sh*t, Different Day’ and sprints off with it down the millennia.
Finally, ending like all good things must, comes the final track of the evening. No Reptiles. The precursor to the Arch Enemy fatberg, Higgs described it as seeing the general public (if only temporarily) as an inactive, privileged blob. It remarks on the lack of sociable change from the top, a pseudo body dysmorphia, and even conspiracy theories; for Higgs, it’s much scarier to think that there are in fact ‘No Reptiles’ - that the people at the top of the chain, rather than lizard people, are simply just fat, bald, ineffective, self-serving, pale old men. Good thing it’s not like that now — refreshingly, some of them are now known for their crazy hair, and others are orange skinned!
It was an incredible way to end an incredible night. No regrets were had -- quite literally, with perhaps the only complaint here being the fact that crowd favourite Regret was left out of the set -- and the general sentiment getting on the tube was that it’s most fun anyone’s ever had ever.
A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but not by much.
Words by James O’Sullivan
Photography by Abigail Shii
