One of my favorite turns of phrase is the notion of a “sea change” – on its face at least, the Shakespearean term leaves ambiguous whether the change and its relationship to the sea is that of vastness, intensity, or both. The Greeting Committee, out of Kansas’ side of Kansas City, have certainly undergone that in the lead-up to their latest. They’ve been around since the mid-2010s, but on the heels of 2021’s Dandelion, the band announced a lineup shift, leaving co-founders Addie Sartino and Pierce Turcotte the two remaining original members. The first album they made after this mutation, Everyone’s Gone and I Know I’m the Cause, puts that change front and center starting with the eight words of its title and its cover bearing two figures shrink-wrapped together – wearing a deluge of feelings on its proverbial sleeve.
What reveals itself through listening is a record that both meditates on the significant depth of such a reinvention, while also pairing with the band’s enduring older works to become a truly thrilling live experience onstage, like the one TGC treated San Francisco to this August at The Independent, packed tightly even on a Sunday night. The duality at play here elevates these new songs, as well as recontextualizing the old on this first go-around in their new configuration. One of the singles, ‘popmoneyhits’, gets a classic clap-along lead-in, and it can certainly be heard as an exceedingly danceable, cheeky swipe at the nature of pop music itself (complete with a big Phil Collins-style drum fill from Micah Ritchie); but the focus on cash and fame, in this case, is elaborated on in the verses between that earworm chorus, revealing that it cloaks uncertain desires except to “afford to be / anything other than angry”.
Sartino is decidedly animated onstage, jumping up and down from the very first moments of the show, leading the aforementioned clapping intro, and kneeling at the lip of the stage during ‘Can I Leave Me Too?’, a cut from Dandelion that serves as one of the emotional peaks of the first half of the night. It finds Sartino’s narrator mired in a fog of codependency, something that can can be interpreted as the trappings of a romantic relationship, but may also stand in for other experiences – many TGC songs balance bright instrumentals with fraught lyrics, and the meanings thereof have taken on potential new dimensions. Everyone’s Gone’s ‘Cyclical’ does this as well – is that “house on fire” a metaphor for a life, a literal childhood home in a figurative crisis, or both? How long have these cycles gone on?
TGC’s maturation as a band, and their redefinition and reshaping of themselves into who they want to be, perfectly parallels the type of reinvention many people find equally necessary in their mid-twenties, finding a new sense of clarity and control but struggling with the companionate revelation that you may not be where you want to be. This push and pull fuels the music and makes it an exciting listen on-record and especially in person, the latter finding Sartino especially fueled by the formative and transformative experiences of these recent years. She’s in the crowd jumping around at one point, encircled on all sides by smiling faces; starting ‘Honey Toast’ lying supine in front of the bass drum; being carried piggyback at the end of ‘Make Out’ by one of the numerous guests musicians who appear throughout the night, or singing the bridge of ‘Cyclical’ right next to Ritchie (upright, this time). The band follows suit in terms of passion – guitarist Noah Spencer frequently turns and jackknifes himself down towards his amps, creating some noisy feedback; Turcotte also swaps between instruments throughout the night, including some excellent saxophone parts made all the more impactful by their rarity.
‘popmoneyhits’ might be the earliest catchy tune to hit your ears from the new record, arguably more infectious is the album’s closer ‘Don’t Talk’, which when Sartino sings is elevated by the simple, resounding self-confidence in its eponymous proclamation. The band opts to go to the other end of their career towards the end of the night, jumping nearly ten years into the past for ‘Hands Down’, to delighted cheers from the crowd. It has a different sort of clarity to it, the sort of thing a band can use as a jumping-off point in its most nascent days – but one imagines they’re happy to revisit it not only for its persistence in the minds of fans and listeners but also because this new iteration of The Greeting Committee is itself new again. They’ve firmly joined the ranks of pop bands deftly tackling life’s growing pains in song, logging not only the maturation of the members through lyrics but also the evolution of the band entity itself – and they’ve also become one hell of a live band along the way.
Photos and Review by Collin Heroux
