Gym Class Heroes - Academy 2 - 16/09/08 by Dannii Martin

This show marks Gym Class Heroes' 4th show in Manchester in just 2 years – it is such a shame that this show was a disappointment.

The show started with the support acts of Cosmo Jarvis and Professor Green who were both a strange and poor choice of support that just didn’t fit in with the evening – this was shown in the crowd’s reaction to them, especially compared to the amazing support from Medina Lake in their previous show.

The atmosphere soon changed as Gym Class Heroes hit the stage and started with their hit “Clothes Off” which had the crowd bouncing along and shows Travis McCoy practically making love to his shiny white microphone. Pretty much after that the set list took a turn for the worse. They chose to play pretty much all of their most popular, and better, songs in a medley – much to the disgust of the crowd.

Gym Class Heroes still churned out full length hits such as “The Queen and I” and “Cupids Chokehold” which went down well with the fans, but they are such big hits that it is unclear why they played them so early in the set and let the rest of the show die out into a very poor performance.

At times it also seemed that most of the crowd were there for all of the wrong reasons and this was no more evident than when Jesus, the bands second vocalist, threw himself into the crowd and threw a guy out for fighting. Fighting seemed to be the main theme of the evening and seemed to really upset lead vocalist Travis who brought it up several times. Apart from the very few fans who were there purely to enjoy the music, most were young girls shouting ‘We love you Travis’.

Some of the songs sounded really good, for example their current single “Cookie Jar” which is far better live than it is on CD. But some songs were just a complete mess and this was fully shown in a strange 50’s song they performed. It was sung by new member Tim William, with backup vocals by Travis – but the crowd didn’t seem to know how to react to a song that’s arrangement was all over the place and not particularly well performed.

The band regained some credit by performing a brilliant cover of Prince’s “When Doves Cry”, which although sounded great, still left the crowd a little confused.

One thing that was an improvement from previous Gym Class Heroes gigs is the inclusion of a lot more guitar solos courtesy of Disashi – his talent really is usually wasted.

It is most likely that the venue had a lot to do with the poor performance. A band like Gym Class Heroes are much more suited to a smaller venue and it seemed that Academy 2 sucked out the soul of the show. But with the band ever increasing popularity, their venues will only get better – this could be to their detriment.

The show was ended with “Cookie Jar” before an encore which they came back to play relatively unpopular song “Good Vibrations”. Which considering their normal energetic performance was a bit of an anti-climax and left everyone wondering why they didn’t just finish on “Cookie jar” and forget about an encore.

It is certain that diehard fans would still have enjoyed this show, but to any new fans in the audience, it was not a very good representation of a normally faultless act.