Live Review: Seth Sentry – The Hi-Fi, Melbourne, Australia
2 min read
Seth Sentry well and truly raised the roof at Melbourne’s Hi-Fi Bar over the weekend, the hometown crowd welcoming the Hip Hop star with deafening cheers and pumping fists the room over. The event was quite the spectacle, the man energetic and charismatic enough to elevate what could have been a lesser show.
Sentry’s set opened with DJ Sizzle in all his glitter-jacket glory warming the crowd up. It was 5 minutes of this guy in his bright oranges sunglasses, in an already dark room, jumping around the stage hailing “I want to see how ready you fuckers are.” Before Sentry had even graced the stage, an enormous brawl had broken out in the crowd, the swearing and general attitude of the performers aggravating the sold out room to breaking point. After 5 minutes of DJ Sizzle fizzle, Sentry bounded on to the stage amidst a roaring crowd, meeting the front rows with high fives.
While everything around the main man seemed contrived, his performance was a surprise. Sentry was captivating, capturing even the attention of this self-admitted Aussie Hip Hop novice. His painfully simple lyrics, with content ranging from his morning coffee to part time jobs, translated well on stage, his delivery always interesting and incredibly fun to watch. Speaker jumping, beat spitting and constant crowd interaction showed Sentry to be the professional he is, holding the crowd in the palm of his hand.
As good a performer as Sentry is, it wasn’t enough to move the show too far past it’s more mundane elements. Namely, his DJ. Sizzle bopped around the stage like an amateur, throwing water from his bottle at the crowd like a pissed-off Gallagher brother. While Sentry was appreciative, Sizzle came off as entitled, his cheap, riot-inducing gimmicks ruining the chance for any emotional connection. Sadly, the cheapest gimmick of the night went to Sentry in one of his best songs, What’s My Scene. Splitting the crowd into “hippies” and “suits” the rapper demanded peace and dollar signs from the crowd to ram home the message of the song. The lyrics have enough of an impact, without resorting to tricks – It’s the hardest thing to do / To look like them and feel like you / It’s the hardest thing to do.
All in all, the show absolutely went off. Sentry is clearly loved by his fans, who all seemed to be enjoying the gig a lot more than we did. What was nice to see was how thankful Sentry was to his hometown fans, giving a nod to familiar faces in the crowd and stating how “real” the Melbourne audience felt. His showmanship and talent are the things that truly brought the house down, it was everything around it that fell short. Luckily, it’s nothing that can’t be fixed, and fixed it should be if Sentry wants to take things to the next level.
