Blondshell: Band on the Wall, Manchester

blond bark
Band on the Wall, Manchester
July 1, 2024

A powerful combination of rage and vulnerability as Sabrina Teitelbaum presents album two.

The most impressive thing about Blondshell’s songs is how lived they feel. Sabrina Teitelbaum hasn’t always made music that sounds like this; Her sound palette was much more pop when she started out under another name, BAUM, and when a producer friend encouraged her to pursue a grungier, scuzzier sound, she released a self-titled record that safety overflowed, resuming the emotional maelstrom. from her early to mid-twenties with real verve. She’s in Manchester tonight a day after making a rousing Glastonbury debut on the Woodside stage, and she’s wasting no time telling us that a second album is already in the works; we get some new tracks tonight and more on that later.

She opens with Veronica Mars and sets the tone; Now transplanted to Los Angeles, Teitelbaum grew up in New York, and the play is a funny reflection on the tedium of teenagers growing up in the city. We get all nine songs from Blondshell tonight, as well as bonus tracks like Cartoon Earthquake and Street Rat that, on this evidence, we’re unlucky not to get. Teitelbaum leaves the instrumentation to her backing band and has stage presence to burn; Her voice is strong, delivered in a laconic tone on stronger songs like Olympus and Joiner, which belies the often vulnerable nature of her evocative lyrics.

Her delivery also serves to make quieter songs like the delicate Sober Together or the chillingly self-excoriating Dangerous feel all the more disarming. Band on the Wall isn’t quite full to its 550 capacity tonight, but if the fact that the show was upgraded from YES’s smaller Pink Room across town wasn’t enough to drive home the degree to which Teitelbaum is on the rise of indie rock, then the feverish atmosphere tonight would be; Her lyrics are spoken back at her by a mostly female crowd. There’s room for her to be playful, with a blistering cover of Jane’s Addiction’s Jane Says, and the new material is good too: one song in particular, T&A, is marked with her signature wit and comes with a huge chorus.

A one-song encore features Salad, Teitelbaum’s best track to date and one that turned heads when it dropped last year; a stormy revenge fantasy in which an abuser released with a slap on the wrist meets genuine justice serves to encapsulate Blondshell in microcosm; she makes imaginative use of classic indie rock, combining female rage and vulnerability to compelling effect. Roll on album two.

Blondshell can be found on her website | Facebook | Instagram

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Words by Joe Goggins: Find X Here.

Photo provided by PR