W: Oliver Rose
SWEET UNREST vs A.R.T.
Ever notice how most gigs blur together after a while?
You spend twenty quid getting there, another twenty at the bar, watch three bands you've never heard of and spend most of the night quietly negotiating with yourself about whether this was worth the sweaty tube journey. Sometimes the bands are brilliant. Sometimes they're shit. And most of the time they land somewhere in the middle, which is somehow the most deflating outcome of all…
And look, I get it. Routine is comfortable. Nobody's forcing anyone to go out but there's something quietly depressing about the fact that most gig nights in London now run on a kind of invisible script. The band knows what to say. The crowd knows how to respond. The frontman goes "how's everyone doing tonight" and it gets really fucking boring after a while... For a subculture that prides itself on rebellion, it's all very well-behaved!
Which is exactly why, when A.R.T. frontman Alfie Clayton invited me down to Bush Hall for ‘The Rock 'N' Roll Rumble’, I went because of the description. “A battle of the bands meets professional wrestling, cooked up specifically to settle the ‘beef’ with fellow band Sweet Unrest!” sounded like either a pretty amazing idea or a fucking trainwreck.
Alfie had described modern gigs as suffering from "same night syndrome" when he pitched it to me. Which is a good line. The kind of line that makes me think the person saying it actually has a point, which is a dangerous quality in a frontman because it means I actually have to take them seriously.
It’s great, when you think about it. It combines the style and grace of live rock music with... uh... with wrestling… Yea… I admit that does sound a bit shit and is a difficult sell but what followed was somewhere between a gig, a pantomime and a wrestling promo. Held together with painted cardboard, homemade costumes and the collective decision of everyone in the room to ‘just go with it!’
Here's the honest review of the event itself: it was tacky. Properly tacky. There were moments that felt less rock and roll and more Butlins on a Tuesday. The kind of thing where you look around and think, no rockstar has ever done anything like this and there's probably a reason for that. At no point did it feel cool. At no point did it feel like something you'd see and think, yeah, these people are going to be massive. And I think if they're not careful, that's the risk. You do this long enough and people stop seeing you as a band with a gimmick and start seeing you as a gimmick with a band…
But! And this is a significant but! I was never bored, not once. And I want to be clear about how significant that is, because I have been profoundly, spiritually fucking bored at gigs with objectively better music than this! I've watched technically accomplished bands play flawless sets while spending the entire time calculating whether I had time for a ciggy between songs. ‘The Rock Rumble’ never gave me that problem, even when something wasn't landing, there was this persistent low-level suspicion that something genuinely weird was about to happen and that you'd feel like an idiot for having missed out on it.
And look, some of the laughs were very much at them rather than with them. I won't pretend otherwise. But here's the thing, there was real fucking heart in it! Real, embarrassing, admirable heart. The costumes, the props, the painted cardboard, the production, the rehearsing, all of it. Somebody, if not multiple people, spent actual time on this. I'd seen clips beforehand of them training in a fake boxing ring and honestly, the production on those was pretty decent. They are not fucking around. They fully believe in what they're doing and there's something almost touching about that, in the way that watching someone attempt something completely stupid with complete sincerity is always slightly amazing.
The best comparison I can give you is this: it felt like doing cocaine on Christmas Day. It's not really needed. It's a bit of a messy decision. Your nan’s in the next room and you're not entirely sure how you got here but in the moment it's actually quite nice and you'd be lying if you said it wasn't. That's ‘The Rock 'N' Roll Rumble.’ Stupid, unnecessary, but not the worst idea anyone's ever had and a great fucking high in the moment!
My advice, for what it's worth: leave it alone for 5 or 6 months. Don't do it again next month while the energy's still there, because the energy is exactly the thing that'll make you rush it. Build the hype properly. The training reels were quite funny but funny reels alone don't make me want to buy a ticket. I need a reason to go, a hook, something that makes me feel like I'll be missing out if I don't! Put money into the promotion, make the build-up feel like an event in itself. Because the concept is genuinely good enough to deserve that. It just needs to arrive like it knows that.
What really surprised me was that walking out of Bush Hall, I was still thinking about it long after I'd forgotten the individual moments. For something that cost them God knows how much in cardboard and face paint, that's not nothing. That's actually quite hard to manufacture.
And one last thing before I get into the band. Yes, there was another band on first. I missed them. London is fucking huge and Bush Hall is a lot further away from Shepherd's Bush station than I thought… So without further ado, round 1!
SWEET UNREST
Sweet Unrest have a problem and the problem is that they're very good at being a band that already exists. You spend the first three songs trying to work out who they remind you of and then it hits you: Fontaines D.C. filtered through early Kings of Leon, that specific post-punk revival sound. Don’t get me wrong, it sounds good! It genuinely sounds good! But that’s kinda almost the issue, because there's a difference between being influenced by something and essentially being a very committed cover act who haven't told anyone yet.
The closest comparison I can give you is this: Sweet Unrest sound like they belong on the indie radio station in GTA 5. Full of absolute bangers that nobody talks about anymore. It has that Xbox 360 energy. If you know, you know! It's that sound that plays during the loading screen of a game or a song you hear at parties and think it’s incredible when it comes on shuffle. Waste My Time, is exactly that. A pretty good song that exists slightly outside of its own time. The sound of their band is quite nostalgic and I honestly don’t know if that’s always a good thing.
To be fair to them, the stage presence is enormous. Matching outfits, synchronized movements, the whole thing. The singer in particular is giving it everything he has and possibly everything the three people stood next to him have as well. He's at a 10 and the audience is at a 6 and watching someone perform at that level of intensity to a crowd that looks as stiff as an Irish priest and quietly deciding whether to care is one of the more quietly painful experiences I have to watch when it comes to reviewing live music.
And then gradually something shifts. The set gets better and looser and a little bit more themselves. There's a song called, False Start (I think) that's just flat out good. Not good-for-a-support-act good but just good! That song is evidence of a band that knows exactly what it's doing when it stops trying so hard.
Then near the end a violinist appears, which is unexpected and strange and immediately the most interesting creative decision they had made all night. It opens something up, gives them a bit of a texture of their own, something original in a way. But unfortunately you can barely fucking hear it, because whoever was running the sound clearly had somewhere else to be... That's the exact thing that could make Sweet Unrest feel like their own band rather than a very enthusiastic tribute act and it's buried under the guitars like an afterthought.
Also one last thing to add, the drummer wasn't keeping up. I say that not to be a prick about it but because the drummer is the engine of any band. When it's right you don't notice it, when it's off you feel it in every fucking song. Sort that out and Sweet Unrest becomes a much tighter proposition.
A.R.T.
Where Sweet Unrest felt like a band performing in a room, A.R.T. felt more like a band performing with one. The difference is enormous and the moment they came on you could feel it. Something loosened up, the audience unclenched and suddenly the whole evening started making sense.
Alfie is a better singer than he has any right to be (which caught me genuinely off guard.) I say that as a compliment. The range is there, expect to see frontman energy. But then you get actual non showy vocals on top of that, which at this level is rarer than it should be.
The drums felt alive in a way they hadn't earlier in the night as well. A.R.T. have a rhythm section that actually breathes with the band rather than dragging it slightly behind. When a rhythm section is right you feel it in everything else without being able to explain why.
The saxophone was a fucking wild move. It shouldn't have worked as well as it did. There's a jazz-soul undertone sitting underneath the rock. Bass-heavy, soulful and slightly unexpected. The kind of detail that separates a band with influences from a band with an identity. Sweet Unrest are still looking for theirs. A.R.T. have found something real and they should protect it.
The props and lighting are cheap and colourful and completely ridiculous, which by this point in the evening feels entirely normal. Nobody's pretending this is a production at the O2 and A.R.T. lean into the absurdity rather than apologising for it. Absurd, reckless and themselves. A.R.T.
But the best thing about A.R.T., the thing that actually separates a decent band from one worth watching, is that they know how to play the room. Not just the instruments but the room itself. The audience. They can read it, they respond to it, they drag people in rather than performing ‘at them’.
The winner of The Rock 'N' Roll Rumble, for me, was A.R.T.
No deliberation needed. They came, they played, they won the room. Sweet Unrest put up a fight but for A.R.T. it was a knockout!
HALF-CUT Reviews
HALF-CUT Reviews.
We spend our own money so you don’t have to waste yours.
If you want us to come to your gig and tell you what we actually think, get in touch on instagram: @0liver.rose
Read the rest of my work here: https://halfcutreviews.substack.com/