Yeah, yeah—the usual lines about Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes could easily fit here. “They’ve changed a lot since the beginning,” “they don’t sound like they used to,” et al. It’s all a bit pat now, to be honest, but the truth at the heart stands regardless. Yes, they have changed, and arguably for the better. Just a couple of weeks after Dark Rainbow, it can handily be said that Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes are the most accomplished they’ve ever been, completing a real-time metamorphosis from hardcore to punk to post-punk to a steamy, quasi-gothic entity with the magnetism to pull off enormous tours like this. The acceptance of how different it is has only expidited the whole grandeur of it all.
It also opens doors to platform acts that, in previous lives, would be continents away on the musical map. In a Gallows-adjacent form, you’d never get an act like HotWax opening, the flavour of a couple of weeks last year before being promptly dropped from the indie hype cycle, as is very, very commonplace. In this case, it was probably too early, as they’re still a band with plenty to offer. Despite their selection of grooves and hooks being lifted straight from the garage-rock cupboard, they sell them in a way to ensure any new band awkwardness has fully blown away. The bass in particular has a great presence, as an imperative for a band reliant of their rhythm section to pounce as much as this. The closest to true, fully-fledged greatness is the closer Rip It Out, where the penchant is shown for riffing and a trio of rockstar silhouettes that can fly off the handle in a way that most of their contemporaries lost.
Maybe The Mysterines were among them, as they don’t seem nearly as capable at wheeling out thrills at such a rate. Contrary to HotWax and their barrelling headlong to avoid the fatigue of formula, The Mysterines aren’t as fortunate. Three songs in on Dangerous, they’re fully entrenched in their lane of smoky, bass-powered indie that all just sort of congeals together before long; the only real break is All These Things, and feeding that through radio-indie roteness isn’t a huge concession. At least their stage manner is good, particularly in Lia Metcalfe as a vocalist and easily the band’s greatest asset. She alone is enough to keep hooks embossed and prominent, and cut out a melodic focus that would feel far less convincing without her there. It’s just a shame that there isn’t more payoff altogether, where a judgement of ‘reliable support band’ might sound too denigrating when they do do their thing well enough, but it’s just a bit limited to say more.
Still, between both openers, the pump is well and truly primed for where Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes are right now. The insidious swing-and-sway of post-punk and the general raucousness of garage-rock covers many of their bases, but there’s always more to be found with this band. It’s why they’ve gotten this far and this big—the continual growth that’s underscored many a discussion of them, and will continue to do so when, both onstage and off, it reaches such an immense level. In a set dominated by new material, it’s honestly wonderful to see everything coalesce as the big rips of guitar and velveteen atmosphere of Can I Take You Home act as the opening salvo. Followed by the tactile shuffle of Brambles and straight-up barnstormer Self Love, the era of Dark Rainbow appears to be going quite swimmingly so far.
Of course, when Devil Inside Me is met with the furore often reserved for arena staples, you can tell the pendulum does swing in favour of the older stuff. The rowdier material is clearly where the most energy is stored, when songs like Kitty Sucker and especially Go Get A Tattoo prickle and bristle in such a defined way. But in a wide breadth of songs and approaches to them, there’s never really a weak link to pick out. The guitars are perennially enormous (the love for Dean Richardson made manifest, maybe?), and the basic elevator pitch of ‘punk filtered through a Queens Of The Stone Age lens’ never gets old when it’s given to a stomper like Tyrant Lizard King, or shaped for the wiry dance-punk of Wild Flowers and My Town.
It’d be remiss to not mention Carter himself at the centre of it all, who continues to wear his crown of a top-tier frontman proudly. Admittedly, his most ‘Frank Carter’ moments—Machiavellian grins and semi-seductive glances—wind down as the set goes on, with surprisingly little chatter between songs, though it feels deliberate. The balance between debonair lounge-lizard and throwback rockstar is a knife’s edge that Carter strides with aplomb; just as a visual totem with a half-button shirt and suit jacket and long, slicked-back hair, the glamour is in reaching distance, but his existence in this world a million miles away is too enticing to just up and leave. And even when the glances of poise and restraint do show, notably in the pin-drop spareness of Sun Bright Golden Happening, there’s enough coming from all angles to smash back into something sweatier and more chaotic.
And yes, all of that is indeed par for the course for Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes. The reputation of a stellar all-around live act doesn’t come from nowhere, nor does it last as long without the proper backup. But what stands out most is how boots-on-the-ground their variation on that is. There are no bells and whistles or big set pieces to fall on; apparently earlier shows on the tour were broken up into acts, but that’s not happening tonight. No, this is pure firepower and desire, compressed and moulded into the pound-for-pound best permutation of what these sorts of performances offer. The popularity of it all speaks for itself; there’s not a single moment of downtime from a crowd who’ve continued to take one of British rock’s greatest personalities, and build his greatest success story to date. To pull from the title of tonight’s closing moment, Carter truly is the man of the hour, for every hour.
Words by Luke Nuttall
