While audience members chuckled softly over Devon Welsh’s preamble to his set — where he took his time with expressing that what he was about to say was his “greatest desire” to eventually arrive at saying this desire was for the audience to arrange tables they sat on into a semicircle and sit in the space between them — what the request seemed to actually express was Welsh’s very real desire to have performance space become a form of quiet emotional intimacy.
Welsh, touring behind his excellent new release True Love, played at Lilypad Inman on November 10th — an early Sunday night show that suited his spare and cutting music better than any other timeslot. Save for two bright red lamps at the sides of the performance space, the lights to the venue were completely dimmed at Welsh’s request, leaving the audience’s focus more on the music than any sort of visual input, making the show almost a kind of sensory deprivation chamber. Emphasizing this, Welsh played alone, with only a small board playing back the instrumentals to his songs as he sang along in his unmistakable devastating baritone . In this space, delivering his music as minimally as possible, Welsh became a singular conduit for his songs’ musings and anxieties about love.
But, as the set progressed, the dynamic of the show shifted. For the last two songs, Welsh told the audience he wanted something more out of this set, out of this night, and asked all those who wanted to stand up, joking that sitting felt too passive and too much “like watching a movie.” (When drawing parallels to what he wanted a more interactive standing experience to be like, he joked that he wanted something more akin to 3D or smell-o-vision, then asked, “Who here likes smell-o-vision?” After only getting some weak cheers back, Welsh casually brushed it off by saying, “Seems like there aren’t too many fans of smell-o-vision.”)
The vibe of these last two songs felt like a shift in terms of pushing that emotional connection and intimacy to an even further place. When singing the powerhouse “I’ll Be Your Ladder,” Welsh edged closer and closer to audience members at the border of the performance space, fixing his stares to the eyes of whoever he faced for several seconds at a time. And with the set closer “Dreamers,” a euphoric song about two people Welsh knew whose passion for making art inspired him, he aimed to close the night with a cathartic burst of energy and uplift. The song, a soaringly pulsing electronic number, is unlike anything Welsh has ever written before, which he asked the crowd to move to if it compelled them to match his own jumping around the stage and “voice-shredding” due to it being the last night of his East Coast leg of touring. Seeing so much of the audience moving and leaping in time to the music and shouting along with Welsh’s emphatic yeahs on the chorus, it’s safe to say that those attending felt that surge of catharsis and passion that Welsh wanted to leave everyone with.
Opening the show was Boston electroacoustic band St. Nothing, whose vocalist Marco Lawrence accompanied minimalist beats along with cellist Jenna Calabro and harpist Maria Rindenello-Parker. Lawrence mentioned that the band used to play around the area frequently, but the project was put on hold for some time due to his pursuit of studying to become a nurse. The band played a set almost entirely comprising of tracks from an upcoming EP that Lawrence said would be released in Spring 2020.
Welsh’s tourmates Abandon, a band featuring music writers Jenn and Liz Pelly, also opened with a near-continuous set of pieces involving spoken word, ambient soundscapes, and steady barebones drumbeats to create an occult-like hypnotic vibe. With their only instrumentation being a sampler and two standing drum heads, the band brought the attention to their atmosphere of their audio texturing and their vocals, delivered via recitation off DIY-printed newspapers custom-made each day for every new show. (This particular show’s newspaper featured an “investigative” piece about the subject matter of one of Welsh’s songs.)
View photos of the show below:
Devon Welsh’s new album True Love is out now. Stream it below.
Odd Blue Fruit 