8

Fight, fight, fight.

Unlike openers Circa Survive, who unfortunately only a couple of people in the audience seem to know, Fightstar get an epic audience reaction, in fact its one of the biggest of the night even surpassing the rapturous applause that greets Madina Lake. It’s easy to wonder if this has anything to do with the average age of the majority of the audience and Charlie’s former band associations, but its best not to linger on his Busted days as he’s trying his best to cut those ties.

Apart from only one or two older tracks, most of Fightstar’s half hour set is taken from the new album “One Day Son, This Will All Be Yours” their strangely poppy, flat and derivative sounding second album. Luckily, it’s good then to hear that these songs sound much heavier live, really coming alive with their performance. Even though many of the tracks sound like either Deftones or Muse, they give it their all and pull of a set that’s heavy on melody and hooks, with epic sweeping moments aplenty, to say you’ve heard it all before would be an understatement but their performance makes it clear that they’re better than they let on. It would be nice to see them finally slough off the shackles of the pop past that haunts them and move into heavier territory; but that’s not going to happen tonight.