Massive Wagons at The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea: ''The band give their all' | Review
There aren’t many gigs where you’ll get an AOR one-hit-wonder played back-to-back with a thrash-metal classic and a ’90s latin-pop banger.
But that’s exactly what we get mid-set from Massive Wagons after frontman Baz Mills has a dig at music journalists who try to pigeonhole them. And so we get Your Love by The Outfield, Metallica’s Creeping Death and Ricky Martin’s Livin' la Vida Loca. Point made.
This is the hard-rocking Lancastrians’ first ever visit to Portsmouth and The Wedge is sold out for the occasion. Not only that, it is also the opening night of the tour for their top 10-charting sixth album, Triggered! so the five-piece are in party mood.
With a light show that would be more at home in an arena and confetti cannons going off during opener Gone Are The Days, they are going for it.
And Mills is a high-kicking, headbanging, mic stand-twirling blur for the duration.
The setlist draws very heavily on Triggered! – the album’s title track is up second, and then there’s a couple of its enjoyably sweary singalongs immediately behind it.
In fact, it’s not until six songs in that they venture away from the album. But when they do, they go way back, to Buck from their 2012 debut, Fire It Up.
While the band are giving their all on stage, unfortunately the energy is somehow failing to transmit to the packed house. The audience response remains noticeably lacklustre throughout. Maybe the Wagons draw too much on new material? Maybe the wet weather has got to the crowd?
The Wagons should be flying – they’re the kind of band that makes playing big, goofy rock songs (often with serious underlying messages) look deceptively easy. The riffs are catchy and many of the choruses purpose-built for chanting en masse, and yet they can’t quite catch fire tonight.
That said, it’s not for want of the band’s trying – they’re great fun and put on a brilliant show.
For the encore its good to see Mills sporting a Tonic T-shirt, the Portsmouth-based music and mental health charity
They finish with In It Together, a call for unity from 2020’s House of Noise, and as the confetti cannons fire again the audience finally seems to wake up and realise that we really are all in it together.