Gig review: Bowling for Soup + Frank Turner & The Sleeping Souls at The Piece Hall, Halifax

Was punk ever dead? More false dawns on the dwindling lifeblood of an upstart genre have been had that hot dinners around some parts, a premature death knell that has been spun out time and again.

Both Bowling for Soup and Frank Turner are old enough to remember those moments firsthand; Nickelodeon-candy pop merchants and a post-harcore-gone-folk troubadour respectively who have weathered post-millennial sea changes, and come out with their pedigree still intact.

Still, the pair do make for peculiar bedfellows on this summer jaunt across some of the nation’s premier outdoor venues. BFS frontman Jaret Reddick and company have long trafficked their tunes with tongue-in-cheek zaniness; Turner, conversely, has spent his years trucking polemic anthemics and humanist balladry with genteel incisiveness. On paper, it is a curious double-bill.

In practice, it proves to be an inspired choice. Up first despite home advantage, Turner bounces on to the glammed-up rush of I Still Believe and then dials his backing band The Sleeping Souls up to eleven with a frenetic seventy-five minute romp that stuffs a dozen-and-a-half tunes into its runtime. The Hampshire-raised star offers both profuse apologies for a delayed return to Halifax – he last played in 2006, long before The Piece Hall became a go-to destination – and incentives for those sodden by a late June downpour, calling for a “wall-of-hugs” amid the rollicking riposte of 1933 and The Next Storm’s polished heartland rock.

By a euphoric finale punch of Get Better and Four Simple Words, he has tumbled over his audience to crowdsurf – and also tumbled into the hearts of any agnostics too.

Bowling for Soup, by contrast, arrive festooned with the festive air of cartoon-skewed songcraft, like Blue Peter presenters let loose on a post-watershed bender. Yet the Texan trio have always held a better mastery of four-chord hookiness than their detractors gave them credit for.

Almost, with its Ocasek-esque power-pop wash, inspires gleeful moshing, while the pyro-propulsiveness behind High School Never Ends and Girl All the Bad Guys Want prove addictive in their sugared melodies.

At one point, Reddick launches Today Is Gonna Be a Great Day, the perky theme for Disney favourite Phineas and Ferb, though there is sadly no room for his sly video-game romper Endless Possibility from Sonic Unleashed.

“This has been a great night,” he announces before a bruisingly fun version of 1985. So too has it been for this deluxe package.