Cigarettes After Intercourse is among the largest shock success tales in music historical past.
The El Paso, Texas trio makes lo-fi dream-pop music — the type that would appear far more at residence being performed in a unusual David Lynch film than some large sports activities enviornment — drawing inspiration from such diverse sources as Miles Davis and the Cowboy Junkies.
The band’s sound, nevertheless, is unflinchingly constant, to the purpose the place the uninitiated could possibly be forgiven for initially believing that Cigarettes After Intercourse actually solely has one track — which is then performed with completely different lyrics and goes by about three dozen completely different titles
The ceiling on a act like this, historically, has been headlining theaters and small golf equipment.
But, right here we’re in 2024 and Cigarettes After Intercourse are the most well liked band in all of rock — with a tour that’s drawing full homes to main basketball/hockey arenas throughout the nation.
And the trio deserves each little bit of that once-seemingly unfathomable success, a degree that was underscored most not too long ago as Cigarettes After Intercourse delivered a beautiful night of ambient-pop and shoegaze-y indie rock earlier than a packed home of some 13,000 followers at Oakland Area on Saturday night time. It was the primary Cigarettes After Intercourse look within the Bay Space since delivering an equally pleasurable set through the Outdoors Lands music pageant in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in 2023.
Led by singer-songwriter-guitarist Greg Gonzalez — who was flanked onstage to his left by bassist Randall Miller and to his proper by drummer Jacob Tomsky — Cigarettes After Intercourse opened the 80-minute present (that includes no opening act) proper at 9 p.m. with a mesmerizing model of “X’s,” the title monitor of the group’s most up-to-date album in addition to the namesake of this present tour.
They’d proceed to solid a mighty spell over the principally younger viewers members, whose common age gave the impression to be round half of that of the 42-year-old lead singer. The best way these followers passionately sang alongside to the lyrics made it clear that they who had not simply memorized, however moderately ingrained these blunt, but nonetheless poetic lyrics of affection, intercourse, infatuation and diverse sorts of intoxication via numerous spins on Spotify, YouTube and different streaming platforms.
The sound within the now practically 60-year-old enviornment was crystal clear and the stay renditions of those songs got here throughout, to the penny, just like the recorded variations. The tip consequence was that it felt like we’d all simply collectively slipped on an enormous pair of headphones and pushed play on a extremely very good Cigarettes After Intercourse playlist.
Gonzalez and firm continued to softly assemble every new quantity, transferring via “You’re All I Want,” “Dark Vacay” and “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” with the regular precision of an origami grasp folding up a brand new creation. And every providing was greeted with a wave of shrill pleasure from the younger crowd, approximating what one would hear at an Olivia Rodrigo present. (You’re more likely to want ear safety for the gang noise, moderately than for the precise music, at a Cigarettes After Intercourse present.)
The stage present was appropriately minimal, with the video screens simply exhibiting black and white (and principally unchanging) visuals of the three performers, and the lighting results used principally to boost the mediative temper.
Probably the most entertaining visuals got here from the gang, which might use the flashlights on their cellphone to gentle up the world like a starry, starry sky. As they sluggish danced with one another, or simply swayed solo whereas mouthing the lyrics, the followers made it abundantly clear how a lot songs like “Tejano Blue” and “John Wayne” imply to them — even when a lot of them don’t doubtless know who John Wayne was.
The group performed 4 songs off of “X’s,” the band’s third full-length outing that got here out in July. A kind of tunes — the hypnotic “Dreams from Bunker Hill” — was the being performed on Saturday for the very first time in live performance, giving these followers bragging rights to say they’d caught a stay debut.
The brand new report is de facto good — like album-of-the-year-consideration good. And I’m predicting that Grammy voters will agree and put “X’s” within the combine for the general album of the 12 months class on the 2025 award present, proper alongside Beyonce’s “Cowboy Carter,” Sabrina Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet,” and so on.
Regardless of a number of minor tweaks right here and there, the brand new album nonetheless boasts that basic Cigarettes After Intercourse ambient vibe, though total sounding a bit much less just like the soundtrack to a misplaced season of “Twin Peaks” than the earlier two.
The band continues to be devoting most of its time onstage to its eponymous first album — which stays the excessive level within the catalog — and delivered a half dozen of the album’s 10 tracks in Oakland. These have been the cuts that resonated most strongly with the gang, which took the Cigarettes After Intercourse mania to the subsequent stage as Gonzalez slipped into, particularly, “Sweet,” “K.” and “Apocalypse.”
Cigarettes After Intercourse closed the present with one other first album providing, “Opera House,” after which departed the stage, having completely thrilled the gang and written one more chapter in what’s one among most shocking (and fulfilling) success tales in latest music historical past.
Setlist:1. “X’s”2. “Pistol”3. “You’re All I Want”4. “Dark Vacay”5. “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby”6. “Touch”7. “Dreams From Bunker Hill”8. “Tejano Blue”9. “John Wayne”10. “Cry”11. “Sweet”12. “Sunsetz”13. “Heavenly”14. “K.”15. “Dreaming of You”16. “Apocalypse”17. “Opera House”
Initially Revealed: October 6, 2024 at 10:13 a.m.
