Fans line up to see Bad Veins, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Two Door Cinema at the Beacham

Fans stood in a line wrapped around the corner of Wall Street and Orange Avenue on Monday as they waited for the Beacham to open its doors to a sold-out concert featuring Bad Veins, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Two Door Cinema Club.

Doors opened at 6:30 p.m., with one of the bands still doing a sound check as the crowd filtered into the performance area. The concert started up at around 7:30 p.m. with Bad Veins as the opening act. Drummer Sebastien Schultz and lead singer/guitarist Benjamin Davis projected a confident energy as they played through their set, opening with “Don’t Run” from their newest album, The Mess We’ve Made. 

The Cincinnati-based duo caught the crowd’s attention with strong melodies and the use of interesting vocal distortion techniques, such as Davis singing through a telephone during several of the songs. The set went through with only a small hitch due to a snapped string on Davis’ guitar. “I dunno if we have any guitar players here, but when a string breaks it’s like you have to relearn the guitar,” Davis said before launching into the next song.

The band’s live sound was just as polished as their sound on the album, likely due to the incorporation of the unofficial third member of Bad Veins, a 1977 Pioneer reel-to-reel player nicknamed “Irene,” which provides the rich, layered backing tracks to all of their songs.

Next up was five-piece indie rock group Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, who the audience responded to just as warmly (if not with a little more familiarity) as they did with the previous band. Clap Your Hands played with a calm captivation, seemingly very happy to be lost in their own little musical bubble. This performance style was entertaining at first but started to drag on by the third or fourth song as their on-stage demeanor began to lose touch with their generally frenetic sound. 

Finally, the crowd jostled forward as it came time for headliners Two Door Cinema Club to take to the stage. The men came out in style, all coiffed hair and lights flashing fast enough to induce a seizure as they charged into “Cigarettes in the Theatre” from their self-titled first album. The indie pop-rock band hails from Northern Ireland and is made up of lead guitar Sam Halliday, bassist Kevin Baird, lead singer Alex Trimble and touring drummer Ben Thompson. Their consistently high-energy set also managed to be varied, sprinkling B-sides among hits such as “What You Know” and “Something Good Can Work.” The band even included four songs from their yet-to-be-released sophomore album, which flowed nicely with their other songs and which the audience seemed to respond positively to. Before the night came to a close, the band came back out for a three-song encore, much to the delight of the packed house. Rachael Harmon, a senior studio art major at UCF, said she really enjoyed the concert.

“It was a lot of fun,” Harmon said, citing Two Door Cinema Club as her favorite act of the night.

The performers also enjoyed the concert, though some of them were less than pleased with the venue. Davis of Bad Veins, who performed at The Social several months ago along with We Were Promised Jetpacks, described their experience working with The Beacham as “kind of horrible.”

“We asked them to hold the doors for our sound check, and they just ignored us,” Davis said.

However, Davis said he felt good about the audience response and the performance and mentioned that the band might be back in Orlando on another tour sometime in August.

Two Door Cinema Club’s U.S. tour will run for another week, finishing up at the Bank of America Pavilion in Boston on June 14.