Three Days Grace @ o2 Institute, 4 October 2018
“You guys are on fire tonight. You’re fucking loving it.”
Adam Gontier is not wrong. It might be a Thursday night. Some of us might have work tomorrow but fuck it, we are here to party and Three Days Grace are providing the tunes.
Tonight’s gig at Birmingham’s O2 Institute is an enthusiastic back-and-forth between the Three Days Grace and an enthusiastic audience. The band came on to Living on a Prayer by Bon Jovi. The tone was set for a 90 minute rock party. If All You Want Is A Little Of The Good Life, then Three Days Grace are the band for you. The crowd was bouncing along to their 2010 single. I would have joined in but the day before was leg day. #staybuff.
Adam Gontier was as enthused as the audience and it’s great to see a lead singer enjoying the night as much as those who’ve paid the cover charge. When one member of the audience begins a chant of Oggy (and one the rest of us were more than ready to join in), Gontier was loving it, even if he seemed a little confused. Oggy, Oggy, Oggy is not, I believe, a chant that our Canadian cousins were familiar with.
The majority of the set is the fun, punky, rock you expect from Three Days Grace. Yes, the lyrics can touch on darker themes but the riffs are there to bounce along to at a live gig. New tracks like The Mountain went down just as well as classics like Home and I Hate Everything About You. The band did switch it to an acoustic set two-thirds of the way through. It was enjoyable but the change of pace lost a few audience members at the back and, unfortunately, they were loud enough to distract those of us trying to enjoy the show.
Covers of Phantogram’s You Don’t Get Me High Anymore and a brief segway into the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army during Animal I Have Become were part of a great set. The band finished with The Abyss from their new album Outsider and Riot from One-X.
Support for the evening came from California’s Bad Wolves, albeit without their lead singer Tommy Vext. Vext had injured himself at the previous night’s gig in Nottingham and was recovering in hospital. Despite the lack of Vext, Bad Wolves smashed it, with vocal duties being picked up by As Lions’ singer Austin Dickinson and Stars from Bang Bang Romeo. The guest vocalists were a joy to watch and listen to. Stars’ vocals worked especially well on the Bad Wolves’ cover of The Cranberries’ classic Zombie.
THREE DAYS GRACE SETLIST
- The Mountain
- Home
- The Good Life
- Pain
- Infra-Red
- World So Cold
- You Don’t Get Me High Anymore (originally by Phantogram)
- Just Like You
- Love Me or Leave Me (Acoustic)
- Get Out Alive (Acoustic)
- Painkiller
- Break
- Let You Down
- I Hate Everything About You
- Animal I Have Become (with snippet from ‘Seven Nation Army’)
ENCORE
- The Abyss
- Never Too Late
- Riot
Reviewer: Gareth Jenkins
Photographer: Neale Hayes