Free shows are in a sense the musical equivalent of a glory hole, you don’t really know what you’re getting into and you may or may not enjoy it in the end. More often than not, the majority of people have wandered in because they get a see a gig for free. Hell, even the bands onstage are prepared for the possibility that half the people in the room might not give a shit that their up there. At the same time there’s always the chance, the crowd keeps hanging around the bar to a minimum and gets really into a band that mere minutes ago they might not have heard of. There’s always the chance that the bands on the bill are crap, and the kicker is you really can’t complain because you didn’t pay get in. However, sometimes you get lucky and you witness something that’s unexpectedly pleasant.

The crowd at Dalston’s Birthdays on Friday was somewhere in between these two extremes. At one end of the crowd you had people who were really getting into the show, and at the other end you had those terrible soulless sorts who come to gigs to hang by the bar and have a conversation in between taking selfies. I guess I missed the memo, but apparently wine is punk now, evident by the alarming amount of people I saw walking around with tiny glasses of the stuff.

Leeds based punk rockers Brawlers were the third band out four to grace the stage in Birthdays basement venue.  The band wastes no time and charge head first into anarchic lager drenched punk .The vocalist proceeded to make the entire room the stage as he paces around the front of the crowd, getting up in people’s faces as he makes his way through the crowd. There’s enormous satisfaction in seeing a vocalist call out the people hanging by the bar, walk up to them, and perform right in front of their faces. There’s a sense of raw honesty in the way he throws himself around the room. After running back and forth, punching the walls, the vocalist stops to lean against the wall, singing into the wall softly before launching back into anarchy. He ends the concert on all fours dry heaving, hard to tell whether it was from one too many cans before the gig or from exhaustion.

The band’s material consists of fast, in-your-face garage punk coming off their first EP ‘I am a Worthless Piece’. ‘Heart Attack’ sees the band go into an all-out attack of no-frills three chord punk.  ‘No Sweat’ revels in a garage rock riff which comes down crashing in with force of a sledgehammer. “I am Worthless Piece of Shit’, the title track off their recently released debut EP, is easily their strongest track with its ear-catching riff and anthemic chorus.  While the overall sound of the band doesn’t take punk rock to any new places, it does make for some really abrasive punk rock that gets the blood going.

Brawlers deliver a high energy show that fails to disappoint, and are definitely one to watch out for in the future. Everything they do, they do with a sense of controlled disorder and give off good vibes of energy towards the crowd. It’s refreshing to see a band that knows how to take advantage of a small, just above floor-level stage by unsettling the crowd and removing them from their comfort zone.