On Saturday, May 24, Maria Somerville closed out a five week tour, which included her first U.S. jaunt, at Zebulon in Los Angeles. Playing with a full band, the Irish musician transformed the sublime, often atmospheric, sound of her two albums into a shoegaze blowout. It was loud and cathartic and I’m really glad that Zebulon keeps a bowl of earplugs near its entrance. 

I grabbed a spot right in front of the bassist’s zone on stage, next to some dudes who were investigating the pedals. (I told you this was a shoegaze show!) A hodgepodge of tunes played as the small, Frogtown venue filled with people. Hearing “French Disko,” the Stereolab song, was an appropriate way to prepare for the show that was about to start. I noticed a My Bloody Valentine t-shirt in the crowd too, which was both completely expected and probably a bit of foreshadowing.

Live, Somerville and her band recall this brief window of the 1990s, before Nirvana blew up and grunge became a buzzword, when it seemed like the sound of the new decade would belong to My Bloody Valentine, Ride and a host of others who were more about the noise than they were about the visuals. The aesthetic then was nondescript clothing, hair falling over the face, hushed voices, really anything to detract attention from the people making the music and towards the sound emanating from their instruments. And that’s quite similar to how Somerville, whose latest album, Luster, was released on 4AD last month, appears on stage. 

The vibe resonates with me as much now as it did when I was a ‘90s teen because it’s so antithetical to what marketing powers want music to be. I have no doubt in my mind that your average social media manager would hate this set, with its dim lighting and lack of any spectacle that could be turned into content. That makes me smile because, right now, we need more people making music for the sake of it. There are far too many people churning out crap for the algorithm and not enough making noise solely for the people who are in that room at that moment.

Listening to Somerville on album and seeing her live are two completely different things. On album, there are a lot of different sounds that coalesce into a refined collection of songs. Luster is an exquisitely produced album that hints at the noisier elements on songs like “Garden,” my personal favorite, but is, overall, something you can listen to while you’re at work. On stage, Somerville and her band unleash a deluge of sound. At some point in time, you’ll need to close your eyes and feel it pour over you.

This kind of duality between the recorded music and live music goes against the grain of what’s become a standard practice in rock music where band’s tour whole albums played start to finish and, generally, give fans what they know. Even if you’ve spent the past month listening to Luster, it might take you a minute to recognize the songs like “Garden” or “Projections” or “Corrib.” One version isn’t better than the other, they’re both distinct and wonderful and it shows a lot of consideration to recognize that songs need to evolve to fit the environments in which they’re heard.

Somerville’s set was fairly short, clocking in at somewhere around an hour, and there was no encore. The band closed with a rendition of “All My People,” the title track from her 2019 debut album. (Someone posted a recording of the entire song on YouTube and I recommend checking it out.) In this live version of the song, the band drew out all of its epic qualities to stretch out “All My People” into a 10-minute epic. Honestly, with a showstopper like that, you don’t really need an encore. 

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