Mark Redding of the Shackeltons expresses his enthusiasm for Denver’s paper-thin air. Photos and text by Matt Schild.

It’s pretty easy for rockers to live like there’s no tomorrow: There’s a full menu of bad ideas and poor behavior from which a hell-bent musician can choose. Playing music like there’s no tomorrow, however, takes a little more effort; it’s a little easier to crash a car into a swimming pool that truly lose yourself on stage. The Shackeltons are pretty close to getting the second, more difficult one down.

When the band kicked off its first-ever visit to the Mile High City, it came bedecked in the drab olive of army surplus, and navigated a stage filled with branches hacked off neighborhood trees. The combination made it easy to shovel the five-piece into lazy comparisons with British Sea Power’s arbor-and-army days. Where the Britons bring a manic energy to the stage, though, the Shackeltons offer a focused intensity. They’re a laser burning a hole in a rock rather than a stick of nitro blowing it to bits.

Key in that here-and-now intensity the Pennsylvania-based band summoned in its first trip to Denver was front man Mark Redding.

Throwing himself into an almost trancelike state from the first note of his band’s Friday set at the Hi-Dive, he led the band through its 40-minute set, he punctuated his lines with broad, sweeping hand gestures, and intense thousand-yard stares into and through the meager audience. Combining the passion of a fire-and-brimstone preacher with a monomaniacal intensity, Redding wasn’t just a man completely caught up in the moment. He was a man defining the moment on his own steely terms.

It was just about all the rest of the band could do to keep up with him. With a sound influenced equally by early-’90s Fugazi’s angular guitars and syncopated rhythms as the melodic awareness of late-’90s pop punk, the Shackeltons were a band of dynamics, carefully holding back tempos and steadfastly working through arrangements just long enough to make the inevitable crashing crescendo hit like a mid-air collision.

It was best when the band let its spring-coiled dynamics run the show in songs like “The Breaks” and “Your Movement,” as the ebbs and swells of its up/down arrangements matched Redding’s murmur-to-howl delivery perfectly. Other songs without such dramatic tension, particularly a new one based around a spoken-word lyric about a man searching for his love in the great Chicago fire, didn’t deliver the punch they did on the band’s self-titled debut.

The Shackeltons’ commitment to putting it all into its performance was enough to warm over a small crowd of show-goers more into hanging out on a Friday night than blasting through a pop-punk/post-hardcore hybrid, though the skinny-jeans and T-shirt crowd of rock ‘n’ roll addicts took to the young act’s sound fairly quickly, if not wholeheartedly.

Maybe the Shackeltons have every reason to rock like there’s no tomorrow. Amid soaring gas costs, sagging-to-nonexistent album sales and a less-than-hopeful outlook at the merchandise table, simple — yet harsh — economics might mean there’s no tomorrow for bands like this. Let’s hope the Shackeltons get to see another day in Denver.

Writer/photographer contributor Matt Schild edits the Fort Collins-based music website Aversion.com.

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