The Adelaide leg of American rockers mewithoutYou’s Australian tour on Saturday the 24th was a great night for fans, and a triumphant return for the band who last toured Aus in 2008. The crowd was, unsurprisingly, full of bearded hipsters (support act Elliot the Bull even had beard oil for sale on their merch table), and though there was very little dancing the bands, from the first opener through to mewithoutYou managed to attract the attention of the whole crowd.
The openers bear mentioning: Adelaide acts Sincerely Grizzly and Stranger Things Have Happened were the first acts up, and they got the night off to a hard rocking start. Though they were only playing this leg of the tour both of them managed to feel right at home playing with mewithoutYou, with Sincerely Grizzly’s lyrics deserving special mention for managing to capture some of the sparkle of mewithoutYou’s complex yet compelling linguistic and literary imagination.
Tour support act Elliot the Bull took the night to another level though. Introducing acoustic elements without losing the rocking vibe that the first two acts had going, it was almost immediately obvious why mewithoutYou had invited this Central Coast band on tour with them. The band has been writing over the past few months, so Adelaide was lucky enough to see the premiere of a lot of new material from this process. The frontman not only engaged the audience, managing to get laughter and shouts of excitement alike from quite a reserved crowd, but he demanded attention with his onstage presence, which ended up propelling him to jump over the barriers in front of the stage to join the crowd in the final song of their set.
Coming off of this, mewithoutYou had big shoes to fill and they did not disappoint. The set drew songs from across their discography, and even included tracks from their 2009 It’s all crazy!.., an album much heavier on the folk elements than the rest of their work. Like Elliot the Bull, they managed to weave acoustic elements into their rocking set, with frontman Aaron Weiss even having to borrow an acoustic guitar from their support act when he broke his mid-set.
A fun moment came when the normally silent guitarist Brandon Beaver interjected between songs to tell the crowd he had loved the sights of Adelaide so much while roaming around during the day that he was resolved to name his not-yet-conceived first born after our fair city, regardless of gender (NB: his fiancée is not aware of this plan). The dialogue that the entire band managed to develop with the audience was friendly, and when they eventually finished their set they went offstage to cries for “one more song”. Given how much the crowd enjoyed the show, hopefully mewithoutYou will be back before 2022.
Reviewed by Maxwell Cooper
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