2021 was weird.
COVID lockdown had ended, at least for live events, and as I was adjusting to attending concerts that year, I ended up seeing Bartees Strange 3 times: Once opening up a festival, once opening up for Courtney Barnett and once as a headliner. I was only vaguely aware of him when I caught his set at Pitchfork fest but there was a level of comfort seeing him despite only hearing his debut album once. His style of indie rock melds mixtures of hip hop into it, but the whole experience each time I’ve seen him ends up like a very solid, simple rock show while not being overly derivative. It means that while I can’t praise it as something that will absolutely change your life or blazingly innovative, it acts as a balm as just a very, very good indie rock show that doesn’t sound like 50 other indie rock acts. I’m always very pleased to see him come around and will absolutely go see him every time.
His setlist mostly consisted of his new album, Horror, with crowd favorites like Boomer sprinkled in. Heavy Heart was the only song off of Farm to Table he ended up playing, and he finished up the encore with a cover of The National’s About Today. The cover of Horror was displayed behind them, but as you can see in these photos it was barely visible behind the lights and the performers themselves. They also had these funhouse mirrors on both sides of the stage and in front of the keyboard, but didn’t really utilize them in any way except for an interesting aesthetic choice.
The one headlining show I saw him back in 2021 had Zelma Stone as the sole opener, and he brought them back along with Trè Burt as the middle act to make a very good one two punch of local musicians to start the night off right.
Leave a reply