The Ataris have finally come back to the UK after a break of about 5 or so
months, and this time fortunately decided to play Manchester as well. The recent
release of ‘End is forever’ didn’t impress me to the extent their earlier albums
did, and I had hoped they would play a lot of their older stuff; fortunately I wasn’t disappointed. The Setlist was as follows:-
| 1. Losing Streak 2. Bad Case of Broken Heart 3. My Hotel Year 4. The Radio Still Sucks (X2) 5. Better Way 6. Make it last 7. Looking Back on Today 8. Broken Promise Ring 9. If You Really Wanna Hear About It.. 10. Hey Kid! |
11. Your Boyfriend Sucks 12. Just Like Heaven 13. My So Called Life 14. Between You and Me 15. I Won’t Spend Another Night Alone 16. Angry Nerd Rock¶ÿ 17. San Dimas High School Football Rules 18. Teenage Riot |
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Wasting no time, the Cali quartet get stuck in with ‘Losing Streak’ (thankfully not a literal indication of things to come), and the crowd starts moving. As you can see from the setlist, they picked out a load of songs from all the albums/EP, though to a lesser extent off ‘Anywhere but here’. Unfortunately, most of the crowd seemed unacquainted with the older records, and classics such ‘Between you and me’ and their cure cover of ‘Just like heaven’ Marco’s drumming was spot on as per usual, and Kris is as enigmatic as ever, with neat vocal changes like the adding of another verse to the end of ‘Broken Promise ring’. |
| Shouting ‘sellout’ to a band when the instruments stop is never a good move, as one poor kid found out when the band heard him and rightly started to rip into him – ‘Hey look everybody, this guy’s trying to be cool’ – needless to say the victim went pretty quiet after being embarrassed in front of 500+ people. We also got a preview of their new song ‘Looking back on Yesterday’ (due to appear on the forthcoming Warped Tour Compilation), which sounds as though it will be a welcome addition to the Atari’s arsenal of songs. |
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Next up comes the excellent ‘My so called life‘, with the words strategically
changed by Kris ‘Why don’t they just blow Wales off the map?’ – possibly to try
and avoid some sort of riot or other… the crowd are enthusiastic, and
frantically bounce as each song kicks in.
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Despite the being in my eyes an incomplete gig without it, the Ataris are probably getting pretty bored of playing ‘San Dimas High School Football Rules’, they it for the crowd nonetheless, with a person invited up on stage to have a go at playing rhythm; and I have to say he was pretty good at it, so well played fella. |
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The anthem ‘Teenage Riot’ gave the crowd a much needed lift near the end of the show, as Kris invited everyone to get up on stage – one guy was even seen climbing up the scaffolding at the back, much to the dismay of the security (what little there was) – which pretty much matched the song, and was definitely one of the high points of the show. |
All in all, a damn good concert, and the Ataris managed to get through a load of songs, and thankfully didn’t center the whole show around their new album – although I had hoped they were gonna play ‘I remember you’, you can’t have the whole moon on a stick, so I coped with just three quarters.
nick.
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