Forever The Sickest Kids – London Borderline

By Tom Aylott

Me Vs. Hero are a band that I’ve somehow managed to never see live, despite the barrage of attention the band have received for both good and not-so-good reasons over the past few years.

Tonight sees the band on great form and doing a fantastic job warming up a very young and enthusiastic crowd at a swiftly packing out Borderline. There’s plenty of hands in the air and singing along for MvH tonight, and by the time they’ve got around to asking those who’d like to be in a music video to go mental, you wouldn’t blame anyone walking in to the venue ignorant to what was going on for thinking that the headliners had already started. (4/5)

In what I consider to be quite strange genre/fan stereotype, Pop-Punk fans can be right up their with the worst of them when it comes to snobbery. The entire sub genre originated from bands writing songs that people could have fun and party listening to (if American Pie is to be believed), and I’ve never understood the slating bands like Forever The Sickest Kids sometimes get for being “too cheesey”. The band are having huge amounts of fun tonight and there’s barely a handful of people not going crazy or watching from the side nodding and singing along, wearing a big smile and feeling a bit old.

There’s big singalongs to older tunes and songs from upcoming mini-album/EP/whatever ‘The Weekend: Friday” despite it not being released for a month from tonight, though the band don’t actually seem to pick up on / care about that on stage.

There’s points where the band aren’t quite as tight as you’d hope, and taking into account the heavy production work on record, there’s a few parts where the vocals don’t sound quite as ‘big’ live – but it’s a minor gripe, and by the time they’ve played ‘She Likes (Bittersweet Love)’, I’m totally sold.

The whole set is good clean fun, and it’s really hard to dislike a band with very catchy songs for just doing what they want and having a good time. Sure, it’s not going to be to every ‘pop-punk purist’s taste, but who really cares anyway?