Monday 14/11/05 Taste Of Chaos 05 @ Brixton Academy, London

“I’ve never seen so many black t-shirts in one place!” – Gareth Davies, bass player for Funeral For A Friend.

If anyone ever argues that there isn’t a definable uniform to hardcore, and that all the bands and fans are about, like, “individual expression”, then they obviously weren’t at Taste Of Chaos ’05 (This is of course no bad thing: all the best, most potent youth sub-cultures throughout the last century have had a definable image, from the teddy-boys of the fifties to early hip-hop) But anyway… Tonight is the punk-metal equivalent of those dodgy 80s’ pop package tours, though instead of washed-up eternally embarrassing pop stars we get a wave of bleeding-heart bands that veer from the convincingly cathartic to the downright contrived.

A case for the latter: Gigwise knows things are bad for Missouri five-piece Story Of The Year when their Mohican-haired guitarist executes a roundhouse kick that would shame Jean-Claude Van Damme whilst still playing his instrument. It looks absolutely ridiculous, and coupled with the blur of tuneless bludgeoning that soundtracks their gymnastics, is easily the funniest thing we’ve seem since ‘Extras’. While on record they’ve always reminded us of nothing more than a very very poor man’s Thursday, live they have all the empty synchronicity of Lostprophets, but without the enormous tunes.

Now for a band with something to say. Not that we can tell, in amongst the shouted proclamations of Rise Against, what that something actually is, but the Chicago punks are, we’re assured, an avowedly political band (a reputation which their third album, ‘Siren Song Of The Counter Culture’, appears to confirm). Their soaring and unswerving punk assault reminds us of Bad Religion or Operation Ivy, a chastising experience that die-hard fans of ‘American Idiot’ would do well to seek out as soon as possible.

Roadrunner starlets Killswitch Engage win the award by a mile for tonight’s heaviest set (despite lacking a second guitarist), delivering a pummelling half-hour of buzzsaw riffs and the sort of compact aggression that defined the classic first Deftones record. By the third track there’s even a bra hanging off the end of Mike D’Antonio’s bass. We knew Killswitch Engage were brutal and punishing, but we never, until tonight, saw them as objects of lust. By the time The Used’s Bert McCracken bounds onstage to lend his fearsome screams in a surprise guest slot, Brixton has already been conquered.

Speaking of McCracken and his Utah-based gaggle of suger-addled kids: Without the pressure of headlining, and responsible for one of the few notable pop-hardcore albums of the last few years (with their self-titled debut), The Used are arguably band of the night. Maybe it’s because they know that the chorus to ‘The Taste Of Ink’ sounds better when 4,000 people scream back the words “I’ll savour every moment of this”, or maybe it’s that Bert is almost a Pete Doherty-esque figure for those present, with all the associated celebrity and notoriety that such a comparison entails, but there’s a definite buzz around The Used tonight that fades slightly for the otherwise mighty Funeral For A Friend. How these boys from South Wales made it to here is still one of the great British rock stories of recent times, and the reaction to the likes of ‘Juneau’ and ‘She Drove Me To Daytime TV’ betrays the fact that for many here tonight Funeral For A Friend were the band that first spoke to them in the way Nirvana and Oasis had done to a generation earlier. Despite their finely honed new album ‘Hours’ it’s these oldest songs that get the reaction and end Taste Of Chaos on a euphoric and, yup, cathartic high.

As an ironic indie-kid raising his devil horns and standing alone in a sea of Metallica fans would no doubt say if questioned about tonight: “Rock”.