As part of one of the most exciting touring lineups in indie rock/quasi-emo history, Missouri’s Foxing and Long Beach’s Oso Oso form a formidable support duo for Manchester Orchestra, as that band tours in support of one of the most impactful albums of the 00’s. But both groups are celebrating their own recent releases, and each one is destined to be as enduring in its own right as Mean Everything to Nothing was a decade ago. The proverbial hydra of a tour ends on December 8th, a frigid night in Worcester, MA, at the storied Palladium, long known to host the cream of the crop of punk, emo, and metal shows.
Both Oso Oso and Foxing share the distinction of being signed to Triple Crown Records, and both have had a fantastic year in 2019, whose eighth month saw the release of a new LP for each. The former put Basking in the Glow out into the world, and the latter released Nearer My God. Both albums received immediate acclaim, and it speaks to the strength of Triple Crown’s roster – which boasts many a band including MA’s own Caspian and up-and-comers Heart Attack Man – that the albums are radically different from each other.
Basking succeeds through Oso Oso frontman Jade Lilitri’s direct songwriting, a refined work channeling the pathos of many an emo band from days of yore; Nearer My God, by contrast, sees Foxing moving forward from the success of their previous effort, Dealer, and getting even weirder, glitchier, and more cerebral.
First to take the stage are Oso Oso, born out of Lilitri’s solo project of (basically) the same name. Beginning fittingly with “A Morning Song”, throughout their set Lilitri and his band unpack a collection scenes from a life spent savoring shreds of happiness amid the fertile ground of self-doubt. The title track of Basking finds Lilitri either at the close of one such moment of fleeting bliss, hanging onto a haloed vision of a honeymoon phase as many a sad soul are wont to do. “The View” bounces with an upbeat step that serves as a contrast to its subject matter: “All I need is four walls to make it my own hell”, Lilitri sings, examining his romanticized relationship with apathy.
Owing to producer Mike Sapone, the songs gain a pristine quality that doesn’t detract from the sense that Lilitri wrote these in a place of absolute vulnerability, in touch with his inner self in a way one might expect from a young person writing in their bedroom or solitary apartment. Lilitri, 26 as of the album’s release, has managed to perfectly unify the raw emotion of youth with the half-formed wisdom of early adulthood, probing deeper into and wringing more complexity from the “hole in [his] soul” he references on “Dig” – while still admitting in the end that he hasn’t got it all figured out.
Second to play, Foxing strike a much different tone almost immediately. The slow build of “Grand Paradise”, a patient piano and minimal drum track underneath frontman Conor Murphy’s layered vocals, which recall Dear Science-era TV on the Radio, are just as haunting in person as they are on tape. A couple of minutes in, the song lurches forward into its main stride, and Murphy comes out into the crowd, climbing up the barrier to sing the song’s chorus into the audience. Already an intense moment on the record, it’s all the more thrilling to witness in person with the live instruments vibrating the room and a gaggle of hands reaching up towards Murphy to grasp at him as he navigates the perimeter of the crowd.
Perhaps the most audacious track Foxing bring out from their latest is “Gameshark”, whose notably distorted guitars, paired with Murphy’s blisteringly high vocals, give the impression that the band is pressing up against some kind of ethereal limit in their performance.
The influences on this record, and this track in particular, are wildly varied, creating a unique beast that is precisely what makes Foxing and Nearer My God so impossible to ignore. There’s the plinky synths that would be at home in a Radiohead song, guttural screams, operatic backing vocals, and one-off artifacts of vocals and electronic noises made to create a beautiful but orderly type of sonic explosion. Lyrically Murphy paints a heady, metaphor-laden tale in which death and the devil are principal characters witnessing someone’s downward spiral, referring to the latter as “the dizygotic twin of God” without skipping a beat in the wordy tableau.
Late in the set, Murphy breaks out a trumpet for “Rory”, a cut from 2014’s The Albatross whose relative lack of opacity contrasts with much of Nearer My God; emotionally naked, he echoes a ubiquitous pain: “Why don’t you love me back?” And on their final song, the titular “Nearer My God”, Murphy revisits a similar question from a different angle with five years’ more experience behind him, ending with the refrain, “Do you want me at all?”
This night at the Palladium was a testament to how the passage of time hasn’t dulled the wit or the soul of this music, all loosely connected under the umbrellas of emo and rock, brought together by the unique emotional attachment people feel when they listen to it. While many came to the Palladium to revisit and revitalize an integral piece of the past, through Foxing and Oso Oso they were also treated to things equally new and vital, bearing simultaneous witness to both old and new – and the unifying thread that runs between them.
Review and photos by Collin Heroux