Hauntingly beautiful, rousing and rambunctious and endearingly sweet all at once – Lord Huron walked out to a screaming, swooning crowd and ended the same way.
Low lit for most of the show (24 January), the ambience matched the songs - moody, soulful, vulnerable – making the stage feel smaller and closer to the audience.The men of the band were dressed sharp, top to toe in black. Hats on a jaunty angle. Suit jackets and suede boots – an appealing combination. Misty Boyce, the lone woman onstage, glimmered, draped in a blue metallic dress with echoes of yesteryear.
As a band, Lord Huron know how to perform. Everyone was comfortable, charismatic and confident onstage with a charm which goes deeper than the songs. There's a reason why their popularity keeps growing and unsurprisingly somewhere along the way, Lord Huron has gathered a new swathe of seriously-devoted fans.
The crowd was an uneven split between bearded old men, aging hipsters, quiet middle agers who came to sway and a hoard of overexcited youth. It says something about the appeal of a band when the audience is filled with people whose ages range from 14 to 84.
The set was filled with crowd favourites and lesser known tracks and the pace ebbed and flowed, moving from frenetic to languishing and the crowd stayed with them til the end.
The show began amid a wall of clapping sound, the band walked out and began playing immediately with lead singer and founder Ben Schneider saying nothing to the audience until the third song. Going from mysteriously silent to warm and welcoming in an instant, he was the focal point for the show.
Throughout the night, he would tell a story here and there, mentioning this was their first time to Brisbane and was prompted by the raving praise of a close friend. He invited the crowd to come along on this musical journey, to ride the highs and lows and he shared how grateful the band were that so many people turned up.
At one point in the set, Schneider donned a skull mask and hat while playing a handful of songs including 'The World Ender'. It has become a tradition that many Lord Huron fans eagerly await at every tour and when he appeared onstage wearing it, the roar was deafening.
By selecting tracks from every album, the set list took the audience from heartbreak to footloose fever to devotion to euphoria, but in a way that was nuanced and tinged with nostalgia.
Finishing with an encore of 'The Night We Met' and 'Not Dead Yet', Lord Huron managed to break hearts and get toes tapping, seemingly without missing a beat. Their music is an undefinable medley of genres, with folk, indie, rock, rockabilly, country and psychedelic all flavouring the sound.
It might be said that Lord Huron don't need a label though when their music has this ability to cut through space and time, to find your heart and whisper to it, while simultaneously throwing your soul out in to the vast stretches of the universe to float between the stars. Exactly what music should do.
