orpheus review

Tag: concert

  • Big Thief Lights Up New York City on Their 2025 Tour

    by Daniela Trajtman //

    You could feel it in the crowd, an audience that was both giddy and reverent, filled with people who had followed this Brooklyn band from tiny rooms and backyard shows to one of New York’s most storied venues. The stage setup was simple: soft amber light, a few instruments, and the open air above. 

    Big Thief performed at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens on October 25, the New York City stop of their Somersault Slide 360 tour. The show spotlighted their new album Double Infinity, released in September, and featured all of the record’s collaborators on stage for the first time. The venue was full, the weather was clear, and the atmosphere felt calm before the band even appeared.

    They began with “Change,” that tender, looping song that instantly slows your heartbeat. Adrianne Lenker’s voice floated through the early autumn air, thin but magnetic, like she was singing to each person one by one. Big Thief’s shows have always had that strange intimacy: thousands of people gathered in near silence, collectively holding their breath between verses. Buck Meek’s guitar lines shimmered and tangled around Lenker’s, while James Krivchenia anchored everything with understated precision. The opening stretch: “Change,” “Vampire Empire,” and “Simulation Swarm,” established the tone for the rest of the night.

    After a few songs, Lenker mentioned that they would perform Double Infinity in its entirety and introduced the collaborators from the album. The group expanded to include violin, pedal steel, and a few additional singers, like Laraaji, and percussionists. The change was immediate. The band felt complete. “Los Angeles” and “All Night All Day” gained clarity with the added instrumentation, and “Double Infinity” itself had more depth live than on the recording. This album was meant to be listened to live. The expanded lineup gave each song a stronger pulse, and the arrangements avoided overcomplication. The guests blended in naturally, emphasizing how the record was built through collaboration rather than layering.

    “Grandmother” was the center of the night. It started with Lenker alone on acoustic guitar before the band joined quietly, building toward a subtle peak that never turned loud. It’s rare to see a band this big still play like they are discovering the songs as they go. The restraint drew the audience in; people stayed silent until the final chord ended. 

    The encore shifted the pace. Lenker returned with “Forgive the Dream,” dedicated to her mom, then the rest of the band joined for “Not” and “Masterpiece.” The contrast between the new material and the older songs was clear. “Not” felt sharper than usual, with Krivchenia driving the tempo harder than earlier in the set, and “Masterpiece” served as a familiar closing point that finally brought everyone to their feet. The encore reminded the audience how much range the group has developed since their early years.

    Across the full show, the communication on stage remained constant. Lenker and Meek exchanged short looks before transitions, and Krivchenia adjusted his playing to match the pace of the larger ensemble. The new musicians seemed fully integrated, not just part of a temporary lineup. 

    Big Thief’s Forest Hills concert presented Double Infinity as a live document rather than a studio recreation. The inclusion of collaborators turned what could have been a standard album tour stop into something more complete. It was a clear, organized performance that favored precision and consistency over energy or volume. The band approached the material with discipline, and the audience followed their lead. Walking out of Forest Hills, I overheard someone say, “It felt like we were in a forest, not Queens,” and that captured it exactly. 

  • The Leila Adu Trio Sets the Tone for Swat’s Friday at Six Concert Series

    By Kate Wenrich //

    On September 19, Swarthmore hosted its first performance in the Friday at Six concert series. Initiated by Visiting Assistant Professor Quinn Collins, the series aims to spotlight contemporary music and inspire musical experimentation among Swarthmore’s students and community members. The opening performance, located in the Lang Music Concert Hall, featured performer and composer Leila Adu alongside her trio.

    Armed with a PhD in composition from Princeton University and a wealth of stories to tell, Leila Adu writes heartfelt music that resonates both sonically and narratively. John Schaefer of WNYC has described her voice as “velvety [and] soulful,” and I have to agree. Throughout the performance, Adu’s vocals were emotionally rich and on-point. It was a pleasure to witness the trio’s euphony, with Adu on piano, Spencer Murphey on bass, and David Frazier on drums. Their style fused pop and jazz instrumentation with Adu’s singer-songwriter lyricism, resulting in an innovative and compelling sound.

    Although the spotlight was generally on Adu, with her being the vocalist, I often found my attention drifting towards Frazier’s drumming. His kit included a standard drum set with the addition of an electronic drum pad, some cymbals, and a few smaller percussion instruments. He frequently switched drumsticks to change the sound and feel of each piece. In some songs, he scraped a stick across a cymbal to produce a creaking, almost whining tone. The electronic drum pad was used as an emphasis to the snare, and whenever I heard it, my attention would crawl back to Frazier. His drumming was skillful and tight, adding a dynamic edge that made the performance consistently engaging.

    In contrast to Frazier’s dynamic drumming, I tended to overlook Murphey’s bass playing. The bass instrumentation in many songs often had him droning on the same note or playing a simple baseline. However, I made sure to watch for the moments when Murphey’s fingers moved more swiftly along the fingerboard. Then, tuning into the low frequency of the bass, I would be rewarded with an intricate pattern that reinforced the rest of the ensemble. It was also a joy to watch Murphey smile at Adu and Frazier mid-performance, his expressions drawing both his bandmates and the audience more deeply into the music.

    The concert primarily exhibited songs from Adu’s most recent album, Moonstone & Tar Sands, although a few additional pieces were performed as well. One of these songs was “Asylums for the Feeling,” which fans of the award-winning video game Death Stranding might recognize from its soundtrack. Adu made a point to promote her new album during the show, which prompted me to listen to it in the days following the concert. The record prominently features the PUBLIQuartet and Adu’s trio. Some stand-out tracks include “Moonstone,” “Life Matters,” “Negative Space,” “Snakepit,” and “Tar Sands.” Her lyricism continues to impress throughout, and the quartet adds a rich depth that the live show only hinted at. I highly recommend giving the album a listen, especially if any part of the performance or description here sparked your interest.

    This was a fantastic kickoff to Swarthmore’s Friday at Six concert series. It was an incredibly enjoyable performance to attend, and I’m already looking forward to the upcoming free show on January 30. I hope to see you there!

  • In the Blue Light at Ultrasound: Lorde Live in Philly  

    By Maddy Posner //

    Seven years after first playing at Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia for her Melodrama tour, Lorde returned two albums later to perform her newest album, Virgin, to a crowd of over twenty thousand. From her theatrical sequence of dressing and undressing to the specificity of the dancers’ motions to the custom confetti – printed with the words in the blue light at ULTRASOUND – the performance skipped from flashy to entertaining to resoundingly intimate.

    About an hour into the concert, as the opening to “Liability” slowly began and looped over itself, Lorde sat on her knees in the center of the stage, body awash in a blue glow. “Will you let me see their faces,” she asked someone behind the scenes, and the lights subsequently dimmed and faded. “You all look astonishingly beautiful. This is very unusual for me, playing in rooms this big. It’s not something I’ve done for [much] of my career. But I absolutely love it, and I feel incredibly lucky to be here.” 

    “[It’s] bizarre, my first album Pure Heroine came out twelve years ago. I really feel the passing of time. I’m 28 now, I was 16 when I met you. And we’ve really grown up together,” Lorde said, holding the mic up to her mouth as she spoke.

    This idea of getting older was a central focus in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s review of the concert. Though Lorde has always been a representative of the pains of growing up and coming-of-age, with popular songs like “Ribs” giving voice to pangs of suburban ennui, the review touched on the ways in which “Lorde’s fan base has officially entered adulthood.” Though her music previously centered on “underage drinking and yearning to escape suburbia,” these songs “have been supplanted by ones of bodily autonomy, self-examination, and alienation from one’s youth.”

    Lorde signaled both directly and indirectly that she has entered a new era; the concert itself embodied a fusion of current and past selves. The setlist included many old songs as well as new ones, and though the mood may have grown more mellow with tracks off of Solar Power like “Oceanic Feeling” and “Big Star,” there was a completeness in Lorde expressing each version of her past self on the big stage. 

    Fans enjoyed callbacks to Melodrama and Pure Heroine near the end of the concert. After descending the stage for “David,” Lorde cut through the center of the stage audience to perform “A World Alone.” As the crowd surged towards her makeshift podium, more space opened on the floor, allowing for isolated dancing while confetti rained down. “Ribs” was another celebrative act of nostalgia, prompting the entire audience to jump and scream along with the words. “I feel like the crowd was very engaged and it was just so much fun,” said Paola Almeda ‘29, who came to the show with a friend. 

    Many of Lorde’s old lyrics seem to resonate – if imperfectly so – with her grown self. When hearing the line “we’re dancing in this world alone,” one considers how Lorde has described her loneliness, contrasting against her descriptions of deep friendship or love, and emerging anew in her redefining of her aloneness over time. Before starting “Liability,” she said, “This is a song about when I felt my loneliest in the world and I would love your help singing.” The song may be about loneliness, but it’s also about coming back to oneself, and Lorde seems to have met herself with a kind of peace, at least in this moment.

    Another old favorite, “Supercut,” from Melodrama, featured a treadmill, used by both the background dancers and Lorde herself. The song is, as the Inquirer relates, about “reliving memories from an old relationship.” There was a kind of performance to it, with one dancer running on the treadmill while another sprinted towards and away from the same treadmill, clutching her head as she paused before turning around again. This was the same dancer who poured water directly into Lorde’s mouth at another point in the concert. Lorde herself ascended the treadmill in the last moments of the song. 

    The same element of performance characterized much of the concert. Much of it connects back to Lorde’s grappling with gender expression, an experience she says relates to stopping birth control in 2023. Throughout the concert, her look shifted; she started in jeans and a blue shirt stuck together with silver duct tape. She lost the jeans early, though she later pulled the jeans back on and lost the shirt, revealing a black strip of duct tape wrapped around her chest. The two dancers – one male, and one female – may act as another twofold representation of her gender identity.

    Virgin, Lorde’s newest album and the site of much of this gender exploration – both aesthetically and lyrically – largely received high ratings. It reflects themes about pregnancy, the human body, and growth into adulthood. Rolling Stone dubbed it a brilliant rebirth and “her most introspective record yet.” Returning to the topic of loneliness, Georgi comments on how “[Virgin is] the sound of an artist . . . learning to be OK with the uncertainty of solitude.” Despite Lorde’s not-knowing, and despite the ways she may have claimed to know it all in past songs, this album is her saying “she’s never had it figured out.” Sonically, the album itself is a revival of “the steely electronic world of dance-forward synth-pop,” yet the production is “much more sparse,” delivering a more personal output. Rolling Stone celebrates this on her behalf, emphasizing how she has been able to lean into “the chaos of reinvention” in a wholly new, intense yet intimate fashion. 

    “What I really loved about Virgin was it felt like Lorde openly sitting in this feeling of being lost and figuring things out,” said Xi Teng Tay ‘26, who showed up with two friends. “So I really liked when, before she performed “No Better,” she mentioned growing as an artist and finding this song from when she was fifteen stupid, but still worth performing.”

    Lorde mentioned one political caveat of the ways she feels freed by reinvention. “I’m scared a lot of the time,” she said, “And I really believe that we need [love] more than ever.”

    She points to community as another form of support that’s especially necessary for this time. “I believe in what happens in this room, when we get together, and let ourselves really feel something.” Lorde might not know all the answers, but no one does, and in the meantime, she’s putting on a fantastic performance.