For a band that has never headlined a tour in Australia to date, the guys from OneRepublic managed to nearly sell out the enormous Event Centre room and bring a thunderous show to the crowd filled with epic pop rock tunes and flashy production.
Due to the fact that the venue security took forever in opening the doors and letting the gigantic queue of people inside I missed the majority of the opener Emma Birdsall has an intriguing tone, somewhere between wistful and soulful with a dash of jazz sass. There are hints of Lana Del Rey or Amy Winehouse going on and her cover of Justin Timberlake’s ‘Suit & Tie’ got the crowd grooving.
The anticipation was building though and as the house lights went dark a shrill squeal went up as ‘Don’t Look Down’ then lead into the first full opening song ‘Light It Up’, with the band ironically performing behind a giant curtain with their silhouettes projected upon it for almost the entire song. It then came tumbling down revealing an impressive lighting set up of diamond-shaped displays, an oversized screen with added video projections and a piano decked out with neon LED strip lighting.
Aurally though this first song was a bit of a jumbled mess and I was hoping that this was just a case of the sound guy ironing out some kinks, frustratingly I would only be half right. Bass guitarist Brett Kutzle ditches his four strings to draw us in to ‘Secrets’ with a mesmerising cello intro and our frontman Ryan Tedder really gets to stretch his vocals from a mid range right up to a falsetto in this song and its follow-up ‘All The Right Moves’ but the latter is once again plagued by too much instrument wash noise drowning out a good portion of Tedder’s vocals.
It’s not until we get a stripped down acoustic version of ‘Stop And Stare’ that we get to really hear Ryan Tedder’s crisp voice and as the song nears the end you can hear the crowd singing alongside and Tedder then throws in a little urban hip hop breakdown as a perfect example of how easily he switches between styles and manages to carry it without it sounding pretentious. The band’s current single ‘Counting Stars’ is preceded by a Flamenco style guitar solo with some audience participation clap-a-long but once we’re into the song you can feel the floor vibrating as the entire crowd stomps along and fist pumps “take that money, watch it burn, sink in the river, the lessons are learnt”, it’s nothing short of a blockbuster track.
The hits keep coming with ‘Apologize’ performed on just the piano and cello and our friendly audience singing, and as we near the back half of the track Tedder then switches things up by including a medley of covers of Rhianna’s ‘We Found Love’ and Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’. The more ambient ‘Burning Bridges’ has a slow build verse to a crescendo chorus, and to round out the more mellow part of the set ‘Preacher’ adds in a little of a country pop vibe.
To crank the energy levels back up again we’re treated to a mash up of Ray Charles’ ‘I Got A Woman’ and Kanye West’s thumping ‘Gold Digger’ and it would’ve been had Tedder’s electric piano not conked out part way, but he took it in his stride, whipping out some acapella until the piano got jumpstarted again, joking that in the 8 years of touring they’ve never had that happen. As ‘Can’t Stop’ commenced, on the video screen we’re treated to a boombox who resembles Pixar’s Wall-E character spewing out a cassette tape and what appears to be tears leaking out of his speaker eye sockets, it’s visually heartbreaking and perfectly aligns itself with Tedder’s ethereal and echoey falsetto and Eddie Fisher’s pounding bass drum beat, it’s a perfect power ballad.
The encore consisted of all songs off their current record Native, firstly the toe-tapping dripping with positivity ‘Feel Again’, the crowd joining Tedder in a rousing amount of fist-pumping to a thunderous drum beat. ‘Life In Color’ with its strummed guitar and reverberating bass and overall more subdued instruments and we also get a small chunk of Matt Corby’s‘Brother’ tossed in for good measure. They then closed the night with ‘If I Lose Myself’ and it was pretty clear that the audience were the ones who had been able to lose themselves in a surprisingly grandiose spectacle of a show.
Overall the show was surprisingly enormous in scale and scope, as was Tedder’s vocal range and ability to showcase his varied dabblings in other genres. Annoyingly though the set was plagued in parts by poor sound that resulted in a few tracks being barely discernible through muddled extremely loud noise. Here’s hoping that the gents from OneRepublickeep their promise of returning to Australian shores in 2014.
———-
