Near the halfway point of the Vaccines’s performance this Saturday at Bangkok’s Moonstar Studios, Vaccines lead singer Justin Young paused in between songs for a rare exclamation:
“I can’t tell you how fucking happy I am to see you all here!” he yelled, and it was hard not to sympathize with his enthusiasm.
His band had travelled 8,000 miles to play for one night in the Kingdom, and Saturday’s crowd seemed determined to reward the quartet’s efforts in kind.
A multitude had packed itself into a repurposed soundstage off of Lat Phrao Road (in the appropriately named Moonstar Studios) and the near-capacity crowd screamed, danced and pogo-ed a passionate response to the Vaccines’s garage rock offerings.
The band, despite its variously unruly mops, played a set in which not so much as a hair fell out of place.
The group launched into its hour-long performance with a rendition of “No Hope,” the first of a clutch of singles that it spaced judiciously throughout the concert’s run.
A heroic air-conditioning system not only kept the gargantuan venue at the approximate temperature of a walk-in refrigerator, it also allowed the band to perform comfortably while clad in minutely divergent shades of black. Young even went so far as to sport a jacket whilst bounding between microphone and drum riser, monitor and mixing board.
With the exception of a mix that too heavily favored the bass, every aspect of the Vaccines’s performance practically bled professionalism.
The set organically gathered and let off intensity, the light show varied frequently enough to remain interesting and the band itself knew exactly where its area of expertise began and ended, and stayed firmly within those bounds.
If one criticism could be made of the Vaccines, it is that they lack the aesthetic ambition of some of their contemporaries. This Saturday’s concert featured a band of undeniable talent, trotting capably through territory previously mapped.
We’ve seen fashionably scruffy British bands before. We’ve heard guitar-driven pop songs that aren’t nearly as effortless as they seem, and we all know that when the headliners abandon the stage, awash in sweat, they will reemerge five minutes later to offer yet another of their hits (in this case, “Bad Mood”).
The Vaccines, however, understand this formula on such a cellular level that it’s hard to avoid nodding in appreciation as they move flawlessly through the required motions.
And if they fly across a goodly section of the globe for the express purpose of rendering that service, then so much the better.
