In Photos: Choking Victim at Whelan’s

in Reviews / by Kieran Frost / on July 29, 2012 at 9:47 pm /

Photos/Review: Yan Bourke

90s ska-punk legends Choking Victim kicked off a UK and Ireland tour in Whelans on Wednesday. Local band Chewing on Tinfoil are playing as lead singer Stza Crack’s backing band, on a tour they somehow didn’t call the “Choking on Tinfoil” tour.

Ghost Trap, a gruff but melodic punk band opened. They haven’t been around for long, but they’re rapidly becoming one of my favourite local bands, and they’ve tightened up their live show really quickly. They were followed by Crows, playing bleak, shouty modern hardcore. Remember that band that got in trouble for selling t-shirts calling Gerry Ryan “just another dead junkie”? No? Well, that was them..

Chewing on Tinfoil themselves were the last band before Choking Victim. In fact, they pretty much just stayed on stage, except for a couple of members who sat out the second set. They’ve been around since the days of those Blast gigs, but have stayed together and grown up and now play really fun, uplifting ska-punk. Chewie shows are pretty reliably the most fun gigs in Dublin, and tonight didn’t disappoint. The crowd were dancing, moshing and singing along, even for their shorter-than-usual opening set.

Stza joined the rest of Chewing on Tinfoil on stage to play a packed set of Choking Victim songs, and the crowd went nuts. They apologised for not having had a lot of time to rehearse, but they’d pulled together pretty tight, really fast. Not that it would have mattered much if they weren’t, most of the crowd were just delighted to be dancing and singing along to songs they probably never expected to hear live. The show climaxed with an “encore” (they didn’t actually bother to leave) of three of Choking Victim’s most popular songs, with an almost constant stream of crowd-surfers diving off the stage.