Report: Envy Live In Kuala Lumpur

Things didn’t look like they were building up to the woolly mammoth size of epic that Soundscape Records' Envy Live in Kuala Lumpur eventually became. There were the squeaky clean surroundings of the auditorium (even the handrails look polished; a literal greasy pole, as it turned out), and there was the lush carpeting, which imbued all attendees with a certain stiffness and formality. So much so that the otherwise solid sets by opening bands Deng Deng_Etc and Love Me Butch couldn’t quite jive with the expansive intimacy of the venue. And then there were the ticket prices; not in itself exorbitant, but enough to make expectations unreal.

But Envy can deliver. And deliver they did. Because expansive intimacy is what they do best. Bands that incorporate elements of post-rock into their sound tend to get all self-indulgent and wank about progressively building to a climax that never comes. Envy can, in their sleep, drop exactly the kind of rapturous climaxes that their (recently acquired) post-rock sensibilities build up to, climaxes that whirr unwilling souls into a cohesive fist-pumping unit.

It’s sorta like listening to a song where the verses are made of choruses, and the choruses are made of sheer magic. And they can just as easily turn off the beautiful, violent chaos with one twist of a knob on frontman Tetsuya Fukugawa’s console, and lull you into hypnotic closed-eyed hand swaying, the kind you see at arena rock concerts (without the singing along, of course, since most didn’t really know what Fukugawa was actually saying).

If the above doesn’t make any sense, then imagine this: at one point some of the crowd held their lighters in the air. Just ten seconds after a mini-mosh broke out. That’s how quickly Envy shift between whispering one spectral end of human emotion and screaming the opposite.

This wasn’t one where you could sit back and go, “my those boys are talented.” This was an exercise in the whole gamut of human emotion, with the peaks seeming like a large bastard of a collective orgasm, and the (relative) troughs like the cigarette after.

But enough with the mixed metaphors. Just look at the rather lovely pictures:    

Deng Deng_Etc

Love Me Butch

WORDS JASON PHOTOS CHAMP
www.myspace.com/officialenvy

If you were there, tell us what you thought of the show! But before you do that, click HERE to view the gallery.