Angels and Airwaves

When Blink 182 split up, a number of spin off bands where formed. Blink’s front man, Tom DeLonge, formed “Angels and Airwaves”. The band is made up from some very experienced musicians with the drummer from The Offspring, the bassist from The Distillers and guitarist from Box Car Racer. The band has been together for about 2 years, and has only recently released a 12 track album, “We Don't Need To Whisper”.

One of the things that really surprised me tonight was the amount of young children there were at the Academy. Never at a gig have I seen so many 10 year olds, with their confused looking parents who were clearly just there to try and stop their kids getting murdered.


The band came on to the roar of the very excitable onlookers, many of whom looked like it might be their first live music experience. They open the set with the first track on the album, “Valkyrie Missle”. The song is one of the many that starts off slowly and then gradually picks up pace. It’s as if he has tried to make a prog-rock version of Blink 182. Most of the songs followed this fairly predictable formula, starting slow, and then spiraling up. You could see from the looks on the punters faces that these slow bits were clearly not very appreciated, and most of the people there were just there to mosh to the heavier, faster, and ultimately more interesting parts of the set.

At two points during the set, the band left the stage leaving just Tom as he played tracks by his old bands, Blink 182 and Box Car Racer. These songs proved very pleasing to the crowd, as most of them will probably be massive fans of both the other bands, as they follow a very similar style.

Angels and Airwaves seem to have an audience full of people that just want to crowd surf. During the first few songs there were constantly people on top of the rest of the crowd, giving the bouncers a hard time, and near the end of the night I saw a passed out bouncer being carried to the back by his colleagues.

The band only played 11 songs, so to fill the hour and a half they were playing for, they had to do a lot of talking. I think that these spoken interludes where the thing that really ruined the show for me. In between pretty much every song, Tom would lecture the audience on how they “can be anything they want if they try hard enough”, and how the band were inspired to make good in the world after seeing the horror of 9/11. Tom perfectly filled the stereotype of emos who write songs about how their parents took their skateboard away, by talking about how his Mum smashed his favorite tape as a child.



When Tom is talking about his past, it really makes me think that he just needs to get over himself, as he really does sound like a kid with a load of hormones and teenage angst. That is probably why the band has such a big appeal to the younger teens, because they think that they can relate to his apparently tough childhood.

However, one of the things that did impress me about the show was how Tom managed to get the audience involved singing in the songs. He turned a lot of the songs into karaoke, when he pointed his mic out to the fans as they screamed out the lyrics.

Another positive point that must be noting is the impressive stage setup they had. The lighting throughout the show was very intense with shed loads of strobe lighting used all the way though that left me coming away with quite a headache. I’m obviously not built for the rock and roll scene.

A lot of people there were clearly loving it, but the band really failed to connect with me at all. However tight they were musically, they just failed to hold my attention.

FUTURE GIGS

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