The Huntington Beach outfit rifle through their debut record – for the most part – with a surging vitality and pure-enough intentions to thrill a low-key party atmosphere.
“You know it’s twenty years of Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs!, right?” says Hellogoodbye frontman Forrest Kline midway through magnificently buoyant one-hit wonder Here (In Your Arms). The Oregon-born singer-songwriter cuts every inch the silhouette pose of a new-generation beatnik, hipster beanie perched upon shaven pate and glasses pressed precociously up his nose. “That means this is front-to-back, no skips!” he cries. “We believe in the truth, damnit, Leeds!”
There’s a perverse novelty to the star’s words – in part because this lively trip down memory lane refashions the giddy highs of their debut record with enough of a post-Soundcloud-era sheen to give them a surging vitality, but mostly because they actually fail to live up to their own billing and leave a handful of tracks on the shelf. Nevertheless, the Huntington Beach outfit’s intentions seem pure enough – and the low-key party atmosphere they conjure up for a few hundred sweaty punters littered across the Brudenell Community Room is the proof in the pudding.
Hellogoodbye’s trajectory never surpassed the halcyon days of that first mid-noughties flush, powered onto festival bills by an oddball chart smash that – while terrific – is dispatched early in the piece here, alongside the electropop thrum of opener All of Your Love.
But for college devotees now embracing the onset of middle-age, their first album remains an archly gleeful collection, splitting the glossy scene hooks of All Time Lows with the baroque camp of Baby, It's Fact and everything in-between.
Two Weeks in Hawaii, with its Weezer-ish crescendoes, is still a sublime bit of chord-work, even if Figures A and B (Means You and Me)’s absence is sorely missed by the faithful.
Having been originally slated for co-headline duties with The Early November, Kline revels in the added star attraction, toggling between keys and guitars with a merry pied-piper grin and audible delight when fans prove just as receptive to latter-day cuts You've Got an Expensive Heart and Let It Drop.
“Thanks for still being here after all this time!” he proclaims before he launches into Touchdown Turnaround (Don’t Give Up on Me). Again, it is out of place – but it seems nobody is too bothered after so much fun.