On Thursday June 19th, indie alt rock darling Blondshell returned for her first Boston show in a year. On tour in support of her sophomore album If You Asked For A Picture, she upgraded her originally-planned Massachusetts stop from The Sinclair to Royale.
Brooklyn-based indie artist Daffo was the only opener for the evening, but they came on strong and won the crowd over immediately. Their high energy performance was met with a proportionally enthusiastic crowd response, and Daffo made the most out of their short time on stage. It was an impressive feat for their largest audience to date.
Blondshell elicited a similarly excited response from the crowd but went about her performance with a casually cool attitude. Where Daffo jumped and thrashed during their set, Blondshell’s Sabrina Teitelbaum paced and bopped around the stage while she sang. But for the moments of crowd interaction, her stage presence was the picture of someone comfortably vibing at home. Between songs she joked in deadpan, “I actually wore my glasses so that I could see you tonight and I’ve never done that before, but there’s something about a Boston crowd.” In something of a contrast to her relaxed demeanor, she forcefully performed her soul-searching and emotionally charged music with a vulnerability that was heard rather than seen.
Buoyed by an eager crowd that readily complied with her encouragement to sing along, Blondshell delivered a set evenly divided between If You Asked For A Picture and her debut self-titled album. The 90s alt rock influence was unmistakable as her vocals cut through the fuzzy grungy guitar of some of Blondshell’s most infectiously catchy tracks like “Sepsis,” “Docket,” and “T&A.” Fan favorites like “Veronica Mars” and “Kiss City” were not to be missed, but curiously she did not perform “What’s Fair,” the lead single from her new album. She did however delight the crowd with a performance of a new song, “Berlin TV Tower,” and an exceedingly well-received cover of Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi.”
The concert concluded with an intriguing two-song encore combo: the plaintive existential crisis of “Event of a Fire” paired with the seething frustration of “Salad.” Keeping consistent with the rest of the show, there was almost an incongruity between Blondshell’s relatively casual stage presence and the intensity of her words and force of her singing. The crowd screamed along with the final lines “Gonna make it hurt, gonna make it hurt / But I don’t know how to do that within the framework / ‘Cause we were never violent” and then Blondshell simply smiled, waved, said her goodbye, and walked off stage as unpretentiously as she had arrived: cool and collected with much hidden to the casual observer.
Check out all of Greg’s photos from the show below.
