The Arteries take to the stage looking like Arsenal circa 1990.  If they wore black.  All in a line and ready to appeal for offside at any given moment.  The drummer/keeper was in white incidentally.  They start the evening accordingly, playing ace melodic punk rock.

When I was in university we used to call this Emo, bands like Texas Is The Reason wearing their hearts on their sleeves and playing loud.  My Chemical Romance fucked all this up of course, call something Emo now and images of miserable kids in make up, drinking cider outside the town hall spring to mind.  Shame.

Anyway, calling it emotional hardcore or just plain punk rock makes no difference to the bands involved, the Swansea boys blasting through a set that contains a speeded up version of the Beastie Boys Fight For Your Right.  I wasn’t previously aware that the song needed speeding up.  Clearly I wasn’t paying attention.  Catch these boys again when they play the Diverse Music night at Meze Festival with The Shitty Limits and others.

Save Your Breath come next, following on where The Arteries left off.  These guys have played with Broadway Calls before and it paid off handsomely.  The band took a CD back to America and handed it to a certain Billie Joe Armstrong who signed them to his label.  Good work!  The bassist is wearing a Hot Water Music t-shirt and they sound a bit like early Get Up Kids.

Broadway Calls have probably listened to their fair share of mid-nineties bands hailing from the midwest too.  Despite the singer looking like Mark Watkins, a kid I went to school with and having a mouth that was slightly too small for his face, they too clattered through a set of impressive post hardcore tuneage.  Sounded a bit like Blink 182 if they’d stopped the fart gags and concentrated on the songs.  They seemed genuinely grateful to the people of Newport for turning out to see them on a typically shit weathered summer Thursday evening.  Those that were there will be glad they made the effort.