Tag Archives: rock

Jeff Rosenstock live at Belgrave Music Hall review – songs to tear the roof off
6
May

Critically acclaimed punk rocker Jeff Rosenstock marked his return to the UK with an explosive, sweat-drenched performance in Leeds, packed with clever changes of pace, raucous singalongs and underlying anti-capitalist rage.

16 Undertone gig reviews deep, no act I’ve seen thus far has taken to a stage quite like Jeff Rosenstock did at Leeds’ Belgrave Music Hall. For most acts, their grand entrance onto the stage is hammed up as one of the most thrilling moments of the night. Be it dodie‘s gentle organ hum, Sam Fender‘s static fuzz or Jungle‘s interminable sirens, some sort of lavish musical fanfare usually marks the end of the hours-long wait for the artist on our tickets. Even less well-known artists like Larkins or The Beths dimmed the lights and donned facemasks to remain anonymous as they set up their own equipment onstage, attempting to save the big reveal for the giddy few seconds before the start of their first song. The Beths even had their own hoodies with words like “guitar tech” written on their backs in an attempt to fool the audience (stood right at the front and with prior knowledge of just how unusually tall guitarist Jonathan Pearce was, I wasn’t buying it).

It was a surprise, then, when Rosenstock and his band practically stumbled onto stage minutes after the phenomenal Fresh had wrapped up their supporting set. I once again found myself right at the front and within touching distance of the great man as he taped a scrawled set list to the monitor in front of me and wrestled with a mic stand that had become entangled in cables. When one of Rosenstock’s songs happened to come on as background music, him and his band even started briefly jamming along to the disbelieving delight of the crowd.

The lowkey start was indicative of punk music’s general lack of self-importance, and Rosenstock’s humility in particular. Before digging into furious thrash metal of opener NO TIME, Rosenstock announced that he was here just to play some songs. For a pop gig this might have sound like an admittance of creative laziness, but for Rosenstock’s endearingly homegrown brand of rock, “some songs” was all the performance we needed.

Rosenstock performing on his replacement guitar

It helped, of course, that Jeff Rosenstock happens to have one of the most lauded discographies in rock today. Since his solo debut in 2012, he’s released one outstanding project after another, peaking with 2016’s immaculately-paced WORRY., which gladly took up a significant chunk of the set list in Leeds. His latest effort, 2020’s bitter and cathartic NO DREAM, came to define the pandemic summer for me and close friend Ewan, who, just like me, was hardly able to contain his excitement as we waited near the front of the queue outside Belgrave Music Hall. I had donned my NO DREAM t-shirt whilst Ewan’s giant Rosenstock flag remained proudly hung up in his bedroom at home.

Despite the night being Rosenstock’s first UK performance in many years, he was in no mood for gentle reintroduction. Choppy Nikes (Alt) had fans pogoing early on, as we screamed about “staring down the barrel of our shitty future” and “looking for a dream that won’t morph into a nightmare”. Scram! – the finest single on NO DREAM – was just as thrilling, and there was something vaguely touching about a group of (mostly) millennial men coming together in a room to sing about how desperate they are to run away from all the myriad personal problems in their lives. Musically, the climax of Scram! is extraordinary, with a barrage of kick drum hits that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Slipknot track, before eventually giving way to a rollicking garage rock payoff.

Rosenstock held nothing back in his performance of every last song, convulsing and twitching towards the microphone during his most pointed lyrics, turning around and keeling over his guitar in the ecstatic pain typical of loud rock music during many vocal breaks. It was scarcely more than 15 minutes in by the time he started to get visibly sweaty, and another 15 minutes later I could feel the occasional speck of lukewarm sweat splatter onto me whenever Rosenstock got overly energetic in his dancing; such is the visceral experience of being at the very front of a Jeff Rosenstock gig. His poor guitar got so drenched that he had to swap to his ‘backup’ guitar halfway through, telling us a story about how he apparently sweats much more than the average person. We all believed him.

Fun and goofy-sounding up-tempo numbers like Hey Allison! and Monday at the Beach were even faster in the flesh, almost to a fault, although seeing Kevin Higuchi smack the snare drum at such a rapid tempo never got old. Festival Song was a clearer highlight of the night, with its bounty of singalong riffs and propulsive final chorus, elevated by the screech of Mike Huguenor’s guitar. Majestic You, In Weird Cities should really have closed the entire night, but it was still rapturously received much earlier in the set. Rosenstock’s saxophone antics of the song’s live version had Ewan and I excited, not least because keyboardist and guitarist Dan Potthast had been occasionally playing a tenor throughout the night. In the end we didn’t quite get the saxophone solo we had been hoping for, but an a capella singalong of the song’s awe-inspiring final hook nonetheless felt pretty special. f a m e, NO DREAM‘s grandest moment, was the only significant set list casualty of the night.

The hits continued with the restless N O D R E A M, which was a good excuse for Ewan’s first stagedive of the night to the ire of the Belgrave security guards and general approval of fellow revellers, although no one quite had the boldness to do any crowdsurfing of their own for the entire night. The absurd sight of my friend’s limbs coming in and out of view in the melee beside me enhanced the giddy excitement of Rosenstock’s noisiest tracks. After that first stagedive I wasn’t to see him for a good 30 minutes whilst I clung on to my spot at the very front, wary of crush injuries from the occasional mosh pit surge. I was close enough to Rosenstock for him to confer with me in bafflement when the inevitable “Yorkshire” chants arrived before the encore.

Rosenstock connected with the fans on the closing tracks

And what an encore. To the delight of Ewan and I, it was mostly devoted to the final five songs of WORRY., which are woven together beautifully into one remarkable ten-minute long rock opus. Every chorus set the mosh pit on fire, and in quieter moments Rosenstock was almost entirely drowned out by a crowd intent on screaming every last lyric. Exhausted, Rosenstock lay down on stage towards the end of the segment, dozens of hands pouring at his shoulders and willing him to push himself out above the heads of the audience.

It had been a show with little fanfare and little space for sentimentality, but at the very end Rosenstock gave us a morsel with the calming cooldown of We Begged 2 Explode. “All these magic moments are forgotten,” we all chanted as Rosenstock waved goodnight. If we had bothered to listen to the words we were screaming, we may have realised how fleeting emotional highs like these really are.

Lizzy McAlpine: five seconds flat review – indie-folk star raises the stakes
15
Apr

She may be yet to firmly establish her own distinctive sound, but Lizzy McAlpine strikes gold on several occasions on this sophomore LP destined to be one of the more compelling and consistent breakup albums of the year.

There’s a remarkable moment about seven minutes into Lizzy McAlpine’s second album, five seconds flat. After two verses and choruses with building menace, a bridge sees McAlpine’s belted vocals almost entirely consumed by a pair of battling, distorted synth lines that switch violently from one ear to the other and back again. Supported by the throb of an electronic kick drum and a gunshot-like snare sound, the result is a gutsy minute or two of industrial-leaning electronic music before McAlpine takes back control by way of an acoustic guitar breakdown, bringing the various musical strands of the masterful erase me back together for the big denouement. This meshing of acoustic and electronic instrumentation – often considered risky or plainly wrong by much of the modern pop industry – is totally uncharted territory for McAlpine, an artist much more used to the comfortable, folk constraints of an acoustic guitar and perhaps the occasional upright piano. Take her excellent 2021 project, When The World Stopped Moving, which unpacked the global trauma of the pandemic with intimate, acoustic solo recordings, putting a spotlight on McAlpine’s outstanding vocal ability in the process. To hear just a few moments of her now delving into electronic pop with such spectacular results is hugely promising.

Elsewhere on the singer-songwriter’s sophomore effort there are plenty more surprises to enjoy. all my ghosts, for instance, finds itself wading deeper and deeper into indie rock territory as the song progresses, culminating in a spectacular final minute. The saccarine sentimentalism of McAlpine’s debut album still lingers (“You got a Slurpee for free / I caught you lookin’ at me in the 7-Eleven”), but this time its accompanied by musical fireworks by way of sparkling performance from McAlpine’s band. By contrast, an ego thing‘s quirky minimalism wouldn’t sound out of place on a Billie Eilish record, with Eilish’s uncomfortably close ASMR whispers traded for McAlpine’s bell-clear, Broadway-ready vocals.

Besides showcasing risks that McAlpine’s debut album so sorely lacked, five seconds flat excels as an album clearly thought out and smartly executed. Halloween themes are established by stark opener doomsday and crop up throughout the following 13 tracks. It’s a strong, excellently produced opener, although the obvious extended funeral metaphor for the breakup in question comes across as somewhat lazy. The driving metaphor of reckless driving is even more laboured and uninspired (“Would you hold me when we crash or would you let me go?”), but an exciting crescendo to finish before a abrupt finish (presumably the car crash in question) partly saves the song.

Spacey follow-up weird feels appropriately like an exploration of the afterlife, and the intimate vocals and distant percussion and guitars lend it the same vaguely comforting feeling of a Phoebe Bridgers song with slightly less poetic lyrics. ceilings is a much better display of McAlpine’s lyrical ability, describing an idyllic young love that turns out to be entirely imaginary by the time we reach a devastating final chorus. The country-tinged instrumentation – complete with a beautiful strings arrangement – is utterly gorgeous, and McAlpine’s delicately sung melody floats above it all like a butterfly. Compositionally, it may be the least ambitious moment on the whole album, but it also happens to be one of the most exquisite acoustic ballads McAlpine has ever written – and she’s written many.

Just when the album begins to get a little emotionally heavy, McAlpine hits us with firearm, a power pop left hook that attempts the success of similar recent attempts at noisy rock from both Eilish and Bridgers. five seconds flat‘s rock moment is not quite as explosive or expansive as Happier Than Ever or I Know The End, but it does still pack a punch, with McAlpine at one point asking whether a breakup was over “fame or the lack thereof”, having been convinced that she was loved. As McAlpine returns to her usual acoustic guitar moments later, there’s a sense that the pure anger just showcased hasn’t gone away completely but has rather been bottled back up inside her, ready to be unleashed again whenever she sees fit. I can only hope McAlpine lets her inner anger out more often on future releases.

nobody likes a secret and chemtrails are much less stylistically interesting, but the latter is a particularly heartbreaking elegy to McAlpine’s father. “I see chemtrails in the sky, but I don’t see the plane,” McAlpine sings poignantly, reflecting on the impact her father has made on her, even after his passing. Wistful home audio recordings close the track, and the goofy “goodnight!” from a young Lizzy feels like a more permanent goodbye. Fast-pased indie pop track orange show speedway ends the album nicely, suitably restrained in its cheeriness in the wake of chemtrails.

Looking back on the album in its entirety, McAlpine’s musical style is consitently interesting and varied, almost to a fault. We are yet to hear McAlpine’s definitive sound or hear much to distinguish her from the plethora of similar female American singer-songwriters. That said, this female American singer-songwriter is producing more impressive songs than most, and the sharp stylistic shifts and attention-grabbing production decisions that crop up throughout five seconds flat deserve plenty of praise. Her full potential hasn’t quite been realised yet, but judging by her current forward momentum it won’t be long until McAlpine is producing records even more exciting than this one.