After several years of constant gigging and attempting to break out of their small seaside setting of Llandudno, it’d be fair to say that 2014 has been Catfish & The Bottlemen’s year. With a debut album that well and truly surpassed all expectations and a sell out UK tour, it seems everyone is buying into their anthemic, three-chord indie sound.
Unsurprisingly, the Ritz is completely packed out on this cold December night and the prospect of Van McCann and co. arriving onstage creates a wave of excitement that’s diffused throughout the entire venue. It might be early days for the mop-headed quartet but the impact that their hard-hitting anthems have had on us all already is pretty mammoth. Kicking off their energetic set with ‘Rango,’ closely followed by ‘Pacifier’ immediately puts the Ritz’s infamous bouncing floor to the test as every member of the crowd surges in an attempt to haul to the barrier. Opening with two of their biggest and most well-known tracks is certainly a bold move but as they power through the rest of their short but sweet set list, the logic behind this decision is clear as each track just gets bigger and bigger. Not to mention the crowd who just get livelier and livelier.
Anthem after anthem is thrown at us; tracks like ‘Sidewinder’ make it obvious that Catfish & The Bottlemen’s debut LP, The Balcony, was a hit with this Mancunian crowd as the whole venue exclaim “whoever you’re mixing your drinks with is dying to go to town on you,” which is impressive to say that the album is only a few months old. Whereas classics like ‘Fallout’ brew a rowdy, intoxicated crowd; “I was a test-tube baby, that’s why nobody gets me” uniting the crowd as they recite the lyrics to each other in unison.
‘Homesick,’ ‘Kathleen’ and of course ‘Cocoon’ enticed the crowd but it wasn’t until ‘Tyrants’ that the true extent of euphoria was established. Its screeching guitars and brash spells of percussion proving to be the perfect culmination to a brilliant set, particularly as the track draws to a close and comes back in at around three and a half minutes.
For a band that have only recently started to gain the recognition they have been working towards for so long, it’s clear that all this hard work has paid off as everyone packed into the Ritz tonight is left wanting more. I’m pretty certain I’m not alone in wishing that the set would never come to an end.
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