FIDLAR @ The Garage, Highbury

FIDLAR
 

FIDLAR are recent cousins in a family of West Coast hardcore bands that stretches back through Black Flag and the Circle Jerks to The Germs. Unlike the social commentary, paranoid conspiracies, anti-establishmant rants or nihilism espoused by their musical forefathers however, FIDLAR are more like angrily riffing Beach Boys – a slice of the former’s surf-bum devil-may-care-while-it’s-sunny attitude dunked into the power-pop-punk of their nearer Californian contemporaries Green Day and Blink 182 (they cover ‘Dammit‘).

Their tracks are propulsive, catchy rackets drenched in cheap power-chord riffs and calls to drink beer, smoke weed, grab a skate board and flick everyone the bird. “Fuck school, fuck going to work, fuck all that,” says singer Zac Carper helpfully. “Start a band. I mean, if we can do it…”

So while FIDLAR (from a skater acronym, Fuck It Dog Life’s A Risk) aren’t going to bring about the Decline of Western Civilisation anytime soon, nor leave the government quaking in their boots, they still kick out a mighty roar that has the teenage element here at The Garage leaping about like they’re hepped up on E102.

“This song’s about rehab, rehab is shit because you can’t drink,” he tells the breathless audience – who nod, barely comprehending the horror of it all – as they launch into the upbeat ‘No Waves‘.

It’s mayhem down the front as fan after fan pour over the barrier, security barely able to keep up with the assault of flailing legs and arms at first, and later completely succumbing to stage incursions and adventurous dives into the crowd across a six foot gap. Not everyone makes it. One tiny girl, five foot nothing in shorts and a gingham shirt, is deposited from on high into the arms of waiting bouncers who waft her down to earth whereupon she scampers back to repeat her airborne journey again and again, grinning ear to ear. Minimal band T-shirts just read “FIDLAR CHEAP BEER”, while behind the front few rows the mosh pit is full-on, without actually inspiring violence, and rank with the smell of hot, beer-drenched sweaty bodies who roar along to the shout-tastic chorus of ‘Cheap Beer‘: “I. Drink. Cheap. Beer. So. What. Fuck. You.”

Ironically, for all their hardcore sounds, with a short singer sporting a Union Jack shirt, a tall bassist with too-short trousers and a beanie, a drummer with a big mop of hair, and their generally good-natured vibe, they’re almost like the Monkees of punk.

FIDLAR serve up the in-your-face, three-chords-is-enough attitude of punk in a vessel carved from the sounds of Californian hardcore rather than the British bands of 1977, and it’s great fun for all that. Heading away from the stage, the army of ardent, silky-skinned fans at the front are replaced with the beards, jowls and wrinkles of an older crowd, where frenetic mosh-pit plunging makes way for the more restrained “aggressive head nod” style of dancing, but the wide grins on faces throughout show that what FIDLAR do appeals to anyone with a taste for balls-out music with an attitude to match. They’ll probably conquer the world, by accident.

 

[Words and pictures originally published at Clashmusic.com]



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