Live Review: Hot Mulligan - New Century Hall, Manchester 02/09/2023
Two sides of the same coin, post-emo pioneers Hot Mulligan and Spanish Love Songs land in Manchester for one of the city’s most highly anticipated shows of the summer.
Mention emo to anyone, and the chances are that the vast majority of people will jump to images of bands such as Fall Out Boy, Panic at the Disco or My Chemical Romance. Those people wouldn’t be wrong, but they’d also only just be scratching the surface.
Enter Hot Mulligan and Spanish Love Songs. Two of the fastest rising emo bands of the last five years, whether you subscribe to the idea of post-emo as a genre or not, it’s impossible to argue against either band’s appeal tonight, as the relatively new venue of New Century Hall in Manchester rapid starts filling up.
With just the two bands on tonight’s bill, it’s both an exciting and an usual prospect. The result is a packed venue certainly, but also an almost-headline length set from Spanish Love Songs, who we’d put money on to be huge come this time next year.
Coming off the back of the release of their fourth album No Joy, it’s this and previous record Brave Faces Everyone that form much of tonight’s setlist. As such, their set is both cathartic and emotional, with new tracks such as ‘Clean Up Crew’ and ‘Haunted’ fitting it in effortlessly beside more established tracks.
Indeed, it’s a testament to the band, but also their fans, that such new material does fit so seamlessly. And though the record was released just yesterday, newer cuts are met with the same enthusiasm from a crowd that’s happily in the palm of frontman Dylan Slocum’s hand.
Of course, it’s the tracks from Brave Faces Everyone that resonate strongest tonight, the likes of ‘Routine Pain’, ‘Kick’, and ‘Losers’ causing more than just this writer to shed a tear. Released on the cusp of the pandemic, its narrative of modern-day issues couldn’t have been timed more perfectly, and as such it’s already an album that means so much to so many. This is most evident on the band’s final track of the evening, the eponymous ‘Brave Faces Everyone’, with much of the crowd belting back each and every word to the five-piece on stage.
The first band of the evening they might have been, a support band they are not. And we can’t wait to see them when they headline their own tour over here in January.
Speaking of headliners, there’s enough time for a quick trip to the merch stall for a SLS tee before Hot Mulligan come bounding on to the stage. Though both bands can loosely be described as emo, Hot Mulligan take a different approach to their sound, more caffeinated younger brother than world-weary cynicism.
As such, their set is an energetic and frantic tour-de-force that tears through almost 20 songs in a little over an hour, we’re reminded of bands such as PUP and The Front Bottoms, both in their scrappy DIY pop-punk approach to their music, but also in that it’s easy to see Hot Mulligan becoming just as big, just as quickly.
Opening with ‘OG Pale Blue Sky’ before moving quickly into ‘*equips sunglasses*’, the crowd that was stoic in its emotions for the previous band becomes a heaving mass of bodies. The occasional crowd surfer is propelled forward, but far less than one might expect at such a show, a definite sign that we’re all getting older.
It doesn’t mean we can’t still have fun though. And both crowd and band are clearly enjoying themselves, despite frontman Nathan Sanville saying he has a throat infection and “feels like shit”. Seemingly, it doesn’t hamper their set any as they banter easily on stage before launching into tracks such as ‘Shhh! Golf Is On’ and ‘No Shoes in the Coffee Shop (Or Socks)’.
It’s hard to put a label on Hot Mulligan’s sound, feeling something like a bridge between 00s pop-punk, ‘90s emo and ‘10s emo revival. Indeed, tonight’s set itself builds from bright and breezy pop-punk in its early stages, to, at times, feeling really more like post-hardcore. It’s something one wouldn’t necessarily pick up on just from listening to the occasional track or two, but live Hot Mulligan really seem to come into their own.
Ending on a trio of tracks in the form of ‘Losing Days / Featuring Mark Hoppus’, ‘John “The Rock” Cena, Can You Smell What the Undertaker’ and finally ‘Bckyrd’, they round out the evening with arguably their biggest tracks. It’s a far cry from the sombre stark realism of Spanish Love Songs, but the two together made for arguably one of the best line-ups and most enjoyable shows Manchester has been graced with in recent years.
Words by Dave Beech
Photos by Maryleen Guevara
