Real Friends, Can’t Swim and Microwave @ The Asylum, Birmingham 07/04/17

If you didn’t get to Birmingham’s Asylum early, you may well have missed out on seeing Microwave, who opened proceedings in front of a crowd that was filtering in from the queue which was camped outside for the 6.00 door time. Microwave give everything to their performance, and don’t allow the early crowd to put them off their stride finishing the set losing themselves in a blisteringly heavy track.

Some bands capture something on record, that seems impossible to recreate in real life, but Can’t Swim have no trouble in encapsulating the passion of tracks from debut album ‘Fail You Again’. What is surprising, is that despite the maturity in Can’t Swims lyrics and music the audience singing back aren’t just people coming towards the end of their twenties, there are teenagers and young adults becoming a symbiotic mass at one with Can’t Swim. Keep your eye on Can’t Swim and expect to see them a lot more during 2017.

Real Friends are a poignant and heartfelt enigma of a band. As front man Dan said it himself, music is transcendent, we were here on this night to stand between these four walls to forget about the shit that’s going on in our lives, to lose ourselves and connect with each other and ourselves in a way that only music allows. Little inspiration meme worthy quotes like this were spoken throughout our night with the insightful Real Friends, with incessant “have you seen us before” crowd poll taking ending with “and raise your hands if you don’t like raising your hands, cus I don’t!”

Real Friends are an amalgamation of various genres, hardcore, punk, pop, indie; they’re basically their own thing. They present a package that is affectional. This isn’t music for the sake of making music- this is therapy, a painfully personal diary that we can put ourselves into and empathise with. Heartbreaking yet invigorating, we can all handle the worst life can throw at us and deal with it gracefully. “I can’t make everybody happy, but it’ll be okay…”

The crowd were lovingly familiar with every song, and screamed it back at the guys with a passion rarely seen, this nearly sold out crowd were all in for every second of this show, and to have achieved such a dedicated following so early in their career as a band, is a massive statement on the talent and possibilities of this five piece.

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Live Review - Real Friends