Live Review: Balancing Act - The Garage, London 11/10/2024
Friday night at Islington’s The Garage delivered some of the best of what London’s live music scene has to offer, with the final night of Balancing Act’s headline tour, supported by both Keo and Honess Jones. What’s not to like?
Whether it’s supporting alt rock stars like I Dont Know How But They Found Me on their recent UK and Europe tour, prominent slots at the best of the UK’s indie festival circuit, or putting on their own headline shows at the likes of The Lower Third or Hackney’s Oslo, London-based, Manchester-influenced Balancing Act aren’t strangers to putting on live music, despite only releasing their debut single back in 2022 — but doing it in the light of their recently acclaimed sophomore EP ‘Tightropes and Limericks’ (read our review here: https://whenthehornblows.com/content/2024/10/4/ep-review-balancing-act-tightropes-and-limericks), at a venue that marks yet another doubling of their headline show capacities, says it all: the night was going to be big. And, with a solid hundred queueing before doors, the crowd were obviously well and truly aware.
But first, the supports. Opening the night came Honess Jones, who wasted no time in capitalising on the already half-filled venue. Strutting, striding, jumping and posing across the stage, with the Gallagher effect in full force, the London local and his band The Tough Love — ‘they’re as tough as they are… love, I suppose’, we’re told during the band’s introductions — delivered a rousing and rowdy half an hour to the Islington favourite. Seconds into opener ‘No Dignity’ and he’d already had enough of the stage, quickly diving onto the barrier to tower over his new-found fans during Ekin Oykener’s ‘80-inspired guitar solos. The authenticity-centric ‘Modest’ and next single ‘Cost Or Change’, around knowing your own worth, soon followed, along with the slowed down, synth-filled ballad ‘Pleasures’ — culminating in a sudden and unexpected harmonica solo — and then it was sadly time for final track ‘Do U Lover Boy’, a surprisingly introspective number revolving around a conversation with a younger self, which brought the set to a thunderous end. What a start.
A solid hour later, it was time for four-piece Keo. There seemed to be a lot of puzzlement from the front rows not quite knowing who they were — the four piece took their back catalogue off of major streaming platforms earlier in the year, after all, though those in the know can still manage to find tracks on the likes of SoundCloud, or live tracks dropped on YouTube — but, by the end, there wasn’t anyone in the building who wasn’t transfixed. Brothers Finn and Conor Keogh, along with drummer Oli and guitarist Jimmy, delivered a masterclass in immersive, atmospheric, and generally mesmerising music. With Finn’s passionate and entrancingly mournful vocals roaring over the Nirvana-coded instrumentals — themselves resolutely suffocating anything seeking to contest the all-encompassing sound waves emanated from the stage — Keo’s set was nothing short of stunning. From the explosive ‘Fly’, Finn’s wounded roars a stunning focus of the resolute track, or the gentle, melancholy ‘Crow’ — the two tracks currently available on SoundCloud’ — to brand new tune ‘I Lied Amber’, almost wistful under the bright lights cascading overhead, or the contemplative closer ‘Stolen Cars’, Keo’s short stint on the stage set a new standard for supports. Expansive soundscapes were the name of the game, walls of instrumentals echoing through the venue and building up to an emotional maelstrom of a climax that couldn’t help but entrap and immerse everyone present, drowning them in the baleful despondency present in every strained note wrenched from Finn and his band.
If there’s one criticism of Keo, it’s that they always tend to revert back to that same incendiary-instrumental explosion of a crescendo, regardless of the song — good thing they do it oh so damn well.
And then, suddenly, it was time for Balancing Act. Venturing out into the mist pumped out by the fog machines, silhouettes backlit by the strobe lights behind them, the quartet cut refined figures on the Garage stage. Launching straight into ‘Before I Shoot’, the manic frontman of Kai Jon Roberts the spitting image of a coked-up frontman having the time of his life, it was obvious as to why their trajectory had suddenly shot upwards — live presence alone, Balancing Act are phenomenal. Add in the sheer range of their music, from the menacing, distorted vocals of ‘Under The Table’, Kai croaking into a retro, radio-broadcast-esque microphone, or the understated harmonies of bassist David Carpenter during the seductive ‘Cheshire Smile’, to the anguished scream of ‘AWOL’ or the disarmingly jaunty ‘A Little More Time’, and suddenly Balancing Act are a standout band for anyone, anytime, anywhere.
The band also took the time to connect with their crowd — for they were indeed *their* crowd — and make the smaller-sized gig venue truly feel intimate. Joining the crowd for ‘The Saddest Song I Ever Did Write, Kai doing ‘the biblical part the waves bit’ as he split the crowd in twain and ventured into the centre of his fans, the short acoustic number provided a stunning moment of calm in the midst of the otherwise rocky setlist — although the quickly followed ‘She Plays the Theremin’ contrastingly seemed to inject pure adrenaline into the hundred arrayed before the stage, the shrieks from the crowd comfortably louder than any of the bands of the night, and the quirky, catchy, and endlessly anthemic track came into its own.
Rounding off the night with electric fan favourite ‘All Yours’, the staggeringly, swaggeringly slick song managing to showcase both the band’s powerful intensity and also just their sheer sense of fun, Balancing Act delivered nothing short of a masterclass of what indie music should be; in a genre painfully saturated with copies and copies of what’s come before, Balancing Act demonstrate the best of up-and-coming music, and hopefully their recent tour is just the start of things to come.
Between Honess Jones, Keo, and Balancing Act, the UK music scene is in good hands indeed.
Words by James O’Sullivan
