Quarterly Live Music Report: Q1 2024
I love being perceived by my favourite band and I hate being perceived by my favourite band.
Spanish Love Songs / Heart Attack Man / SUDS - Fri 26 Jan
Something tells me I am getting old: I now love sitting at gigs. Or, more likely, I have realised that I hate standing. Spanish Love Songs with support from SUDS and Heart Attack Man was the gig I realised this.
Despite thinking how my height now fully prevents me from seeing anything at gigs, this was fun. I went alone. Unless stated otherwise, assume I go to all my gigs alone. Going to gigs alone is a rewarding post-pandemic activity bloomed out of necessity. The only time I have ever done it before was seeing Lorde in 2017 and without a boyfriend or friends who enjoy the music I do, sometimes you have to learn to enjoy your own company. I think I needed to be alone for Spanish Love Songs. Nobody deserves to see how feral I got singing “Clean Up Crew”. It was cathartic.
Ironically, for an album tour called “No Joy” it was a joyful night. Pop punk and I have a complicated relationship; if bad boyfriends did not ruin it for me during my teens, the bands and their bad behaviour ruin it now as an adult. It’s nice to have a band where, so far, it’s all good. The bar is in hell, I know, but aside from my inability to see anything while standing, it’s lovely to have bands in pop-punk make great music and great spaces to enjoy it. I love you Spanish Love Songs. You were a perfect reminder that it won’t be this bleak forever.
Niall Horan - Tues 27 Feb
I like Niall Horan. For all my sins. I was never a One Direction girly but I like Niall Horan and the fact he is so clearly influenced by 70s Laurel Canyon rock. Before the gig, when Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” came on, it was so lovely to see the young audience know every lyric. The 70s are back, baby, and while we have pop culture phenomenons like Daisy Jones and The Six encouraging this, it is the inevitable trend cycle of people born in the 1990s revisiting the beloved Dad rock our parents loved. Blondie’s “Call Me” was also on the playlist. Niall, you are handsome and you have great taste in music; pick me, choose me, love me!
More importantly, I like his graphic designer Nick Steinhardt, who plays in Touche Amore. If designing albums for the One Direction boys means Nick Steinhardt can continue to play in Touche, then Niall Horan can take my money. I am not afraid to be a complex multifaceted woman and say I enjoy both the solo projects of the One Direction boys and icons of the LA hardcore scene. Get you a girl who can do both!
In all seriousness, this was a nice gig. Me and Lizzy sat and had fantastic views of the stage which was a joyful technicolour party. Niall is a performer and a sweetheart and so comfortable playing arena-ready rock that he grew up on. He also played Night Changes, which, even as a non-One Direction girly, I knew was a Moment for the other girls in the audience. It was a moment for me too! I am just like other girls, I promise, and I love it.
Knocked Loose / Deafheaven / Headbussa - Mon 4 Mar
Let’s state the obvious. I went to this gig for Deafheaven. After years of denial because it is Weird To Enjoy Black Metal Especially If You Are A Woman, I’ve accepted the inevitable: they are my favourite band. Ten years after hearing Sunbather, I saw them on a wet, March evening. I booked annual leave for these men. I normally reserve that privilege for the men I’m sleeping with.
Deafheaven exist at the intersection of despair, beauty, ecstasy, yearning and pain. They seemlessly teter on the line between bleak and euphoric. The guitars are both as intense as furnaces and dream-like and ethereal. The drums, provided by Daniel Tracy are more akin to something you would hear at a powerviolence or hardcore punk show than a black metal set. The vocals, provided by frontman George Clarke, are both euphonic and wretched, like an animal trapped in a pit and frantically gnashing and crawling out. They, and I say this very seriously, make beautiful music.
But they are an absolutely wild support act for a band like Knocked Loose.
Knocked Loose are Kentucky’s most loved export in the metal community. They share Deafheaven’s genre-defying ambitions and progressive politics, but seem to cater for a completely different kind of metalhead. They have become the band metalcore fans flock to when the likes of Bring Me The Horizon no longer hit as hard. And Knocked Loose hit hard. I have never seen a pit move like that. But their fans seemed utterly baffled at what to do during a band that does not rely on breakdowns and "bleurgh” vocalisations.
Sorry, I sound like a hater. I am not above metalcore, or people’s journeys into more extreme genres. I enjoy black metal, for fuck’s sake. The Sigur Rós to Alcest to Deafheaven and then hardcore pipeline is real; or at least it’s real to me. I sometimes feel like a fox that has crawled in through the catflap. Blackgaze bands were instrumental in my journey to understanding heavy music; it is a shock when other metalheads did not follow me in from the dark.
Most of my enjoyment from this night comes from the times when Deafheaven are allowed to shine. George joins Knocked Loose for their performance of “God Knows”; the crowd (me!) goes wild (frantically telling the girlies in the group chat that George Clarke has returned to the stage and I don’t mean the man who is on Channel 4 with his amazing spaces).
In the press photos of the gig, I am fully visible from the stage, in the top balcony crying. When I saw the photos on Kerrang!, I frantically messaged my best friend Amy and in mock-horror explained that Deafheaven very obviously would have seen me sobbing. This wouldn’t be a piece of music journalism about Deafheaven unless it mentioned how beautiful and intelligent George Clarke is; and it wouldn’t be a piece of writing by me if I didn’t mention how much I hate crying, especially in front of seemingly beautiful and intelligent people. I must be the worst person they have ever played for, I typed. Tolerant of my parasocial and psychiatrically delusional thoughts about my favourite band, Amy assured me I was not. Little did she know how correct she was.
The next day during their set in Glasgow, somebody took the absolute piss and opened up a rowing pit during Deafheaven’s set. This is normally reserved for power metal bands, or at the very least bands who write lyrics that sound like D&D campaigns. Deafheaven do not do that. A few metal magazines wrote about the affair, complete with video footage of rowers rocking to one of the slow, dreamy outros of Deafheaven’s five-song set. I was enraged, as were some other post-metal snobs who took to Twitter to share their embarassment.
There is a discussion somewhere here, I am sure. Every metalhead or punk has a take on crowdkilling and every concert goer has an opinion on how things have got worse since the pandemic. It doesn’t matter if it’s a rowing pit, the madness of the 1975’s queue monitoring situation (pop girlies, what is going on?), or your local black metal band throwing severed pigs heads into the audience, we are all in hell imagined because people are dickheads; or maybe they just do not know what to do at gigs?
I think Deafheaven got off quite lightly having to deal with me crying in the Gods. Their social media guy did like my Instagram story, so I couldn’t have been that bad.
Bleachers / Sat 23 Mar
Bleachers, the synth-pop-turned-Bruce-Springsteen-ingénue project of Jack Antonoff (fun. drummer turned every pop girlies favourite producer), played their first ever headline show in Birmingham. First ever headline show! In the city I live!! They even printed a little t-shirt specifically for this show! Jack Antonoff instantly got more of my silly little British pounds.
I have written many a mean tweet about Jack Antonoff. I am a Taylor Swift fan who adores Red and Folklore and while Jack is behind absolute legendary Swift tracks like Cruel Summer and Getaway Car, a lot of his production doesn’t get me going. I appreciate his work with other pop girlies too, but I can’t lie: I like that St Vincent swapped him out for recent Deafheaven collaborator, indie pop legend and Nine Inch Nails bassist JMJ; I think Carly Rae Jepsen is a dream when she collaborates with Dev Hynes (Blood Orange) who also lent his talent to Turnstile’s breakthrough record “Glow On”. In short, Jack Antonoff had a lot of work to do to impress me.
The night started off shaky. The support act had shot her voice and meant she was unable to give her all. Each of the four band members visually looked like they wanted to be in four separate bands: a dodie look-a-like singer, paired with Drab Majesty-wannabe guitarist and bassist duo and a normcore drummer. It wasn’t for me, but the music had potential and this was a kinder crowd than Knocked Loose. My night depended on Jack Antonoff and his love for gated reverb.
Jack Antonoff, I am sorry for every mean tweet I have ever written about you. For what it’s worth, I have always thought you, Jack Antonoff, were very likeable as a person; but your performance on that fateful Saturday night transformed me into a full, evangelical convert for you. Friendship over with George Clarke and Kerry McCoy, because you, Jack Antonoff, are my new best friend. You slayed. Put your feet up, hen; you’ve earnt it.
Every band needs crowdwork lessons from Jack Antonoff. Pay him well and learn because nobody else knows how to make a crowd effervescent with anticipation like him. Who’d have thought I could be teased by a synth playing a simple E Major chord and Jack Antonoff talking about his adoration for “shit towns” and the hopeful open potential of Saturday nights? Who would of thought an E Major chord could do that? It made his performance of “Chinatown” absolutely electric.
I am converted. No other gig had boosted my opinion of an artist so positively. I had always liked Bleachers music, even if not fully convinced by them. This live performance was fantastic. They are easily the best band I have ever seen live. I am sorry I doubted you, Jack Antonoff. You rocked my little socks off. You stole the air out of my lungs and made me feel it. You took the sadness out of Saturday Night.
Lizzy, who once again was my partner in crime for this gig turned to me, smirked and said “I thought you would enjoy it.”
It will be hard for any Quarter 2 gig to top Bleachers, but stay tuned.
Tune in next week for the music released this Quarter that I really enjoyed.