Crescendos of craziness: Sheafs reap rewards with thrilling crowd-pleasers
THE modern phenomenon of guitar music rears its head in many forms, none more vibrant and exciting than the quintet Sheafs.
The five-piece hail from Sheffield but, in reality, the band is an eclectic mix of Northerners and Midlanders who came together at the Steel City’s university.
Leicester paid host to Sheafs’ second gig on their 17-date UK tour. Squeezed between a sell-out opening night in Derby and the 2Q Festival in Lincoln, the Cookie was suitably squashed full with sweaty punters clamouring to catch a chord or two from the latest summer festival sensations with a burgeoning UK fan base.
The main support provided the catalyst to what lay in store: Skirt, a trio from Corby, had the same core grit as the main act, plenty of high tempo riffs and tunes for the frenzied fanatics at the front.
A loyal base of fans lapped up the rhythm and bass, finishing with a belting finale of Easy Tiger. Suitably lubricated and galvanised, the standard for the night was set.
It’s difficult not to feel the force as soon as Sheafs take the stage and the first bass drum booms into your aural passages. The legs can’t but shake and rattle to the “devil’s music” as the band tears into a frenetic instrumental opener that has its climax with lead singer Lawrence Feenstra taking to the stage to a cre- scendo of craziness for the run into Fickle – a suitable sentiment for our times played out to an adoring, colliding mass of human bumper cars all charged with full batteries at stage front.
The pace is relentless, the tunesmithery expertly crafty and talented, the energy flows into crowd pleasers such as Mind Pollution and Get Used To It. The madness and mayhem played out in front of the monitors as guitarist Chris Goodacre and Lawrence partake in what might just pass as band-and-audience participation or what might be seen more accurately as mosh-pit Russian roulette.
Never one to rest on their musical laurels, new songs permeate the set list numbers that were crowd pleasers at this summer’s YNOT and Bearded Theory festivals. Bass and guitar combo Callum Wright and Charles Mellor thump out some raucous riffs in the shape of new tune Hate This Rock and Roll as Charlie Estap on drums plays at a cadence that must be something drawn from the fires of hell.
The ultimate crowd-pleaser is the anthemic This Is Not A Protest.
Feenstra takes the aerial route to surf inches from the roof of the Cookie while the throng beneath make a passable imitation of a sea of hands, in the main keeping him up among the rafters as he makes a damn fine rendition of multi-tasking a horizontal crowd surf while belting out the catchy chorus to Protest. It’s a culmination of everything that the packed followers have come for and it’s with a wild climax that the show concludes, leaving us drained, spent and thrilled.
It’s what they’ve (we’ve) all come for and Sheafs at the Cookie didn’t disappoint.
If you want to catch some of the fever, look out for them on their current UK tour. If this Leicester legacy is anything to go by, then you won’t be disappointed.