There are two things I love in this world, well there’s more than two in total but these two things are relevant to this article. The first is writing and the second is live music. Yet, rarely doth these two meet. In fact, I have never written a gig review in my life despite being offered multiple times. I think it’s a difficult conundrum for me, I find it much harder to critically analyze something as unstructured as live music. It doesn’t have the linear beats of any other form of media I consume such as books, film or theatre. Therefore, I ask what I am really commenting on, is it the music itself, the lyrics, the stage presence of the performer. The truth is it is all those things at once and that subjectivity is personal taste is just as important.
Lizzy McAlpine’s Older Tour Changed My View on Concerts
This internal dialogue all began from seeing Lizzy McAlpine at her Older tour. McAlpine is an artist I have admired for a long time, in fact, her second album Five Seconds Flat was a key part of the soundtrack when writing my university dissertation. I had tickets for her 2023 tour which McAlpine cancelled due to suffering intense burnout from the toll of touring, so the anticipation to finally see her live was constantly building. However, anticipation is an interesting feeling when it comes to Lizzy McAlpine because of just how different her shows are.
Lizzy McAlpine staged is set up like a living room, lit by six vintage looking lamps. The band is stagnant and the only moving part is McAlpine herself who travels between centre stage and a piano to the right of the stage. Everything is quaint and felt, the concert stays at this constant level of tranquility as opposed to building in atmosphere as most do. This is definitely to its benefit, it allows McAlpine to explore the musical flexibility of her music, and lets the audience feel the emotion between every lyric. This peaked for me at the midpoint of the gig when McAlpine covered Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game. It was a song I was unfamiliar with myself, as was most of the audience it appeared. Where every other song had a chorus of voices singing along, this moment was simply McAlpine and her guitar. It was a moment of casual magic, blissful and beautiful.
The Older Tour Doesn’t Rely on Sensationalism
There was this eureka moment for me, McAlpine showed me what it meant to be entranced by someone’s voice. As the cost of gigs only seems to be increasing, it is hard to justify going to see someone you are not already a fan of. Maybe in the past I would go to a gig where I knew one or two songs but liked the sound, but that is becoming more and more difficult especially with mid-level artists. Therefore, it seems counterproductive to review something that I already have vested interest in. Very rarely will I go into a gig with no prior knowledge, and most of the time I will go in knowing over 75% of the songs. So the question comes how can I critique something I know I’m going to be singing along to.
This is where Lizzy McAlpine has changed my view, because I truly felt her artistic and personal vision throughout the show. She didn’t just come onto the stage and sing, she came out and bared her soul. The show was intimate, and unreliant on any extravagance. McAlpine let her storytelling lead and it created this deeper connection between the audience and singer that I’ve never felt before. The room was so full and yet I felt like McAlpine was the only person in it. It didn’t need flourishes, the Older tour commanded your full attention and has finally given me a gold-standard for performance. It has encouraged me to delve into the sphere of gig reviews and this will hopefully be the first of many.