Iceage / Mary Lattimore

live in Cambridge (2018)

Brian Shultz

Iceage picked a fairly esoteric opener for this U.S. tour in support of their latest album, the very good Beyondless. Harpist Mary Lattimore does intricate instrumentals with her grand harp and an effects box in her lap that occasionally loops the sounds; while this wasn’t the most tantalizing to my usually layman musical sensibilities, I definitely came to appreciate the impressive craft and certain tones more than I expected. She was down-to-earth, certainly: One song was about Wawa to keep the mood light, and another about a whale passing away to make it slightly darker. Another was “Otis Walks Into the Woods”, the opener from her album At the Dam, and one called “The Warm Shoulder”. When I first arrived to the venue, she was accompanied with a little extra flavor for at least one song by one of the guitarists from øIceage.

Iceage came out shortly after 10:00 to warm applause amid the decently sized crowd. Without saying much to the audience, they launched into the catchy “Hurrah”, the energetic and just slightly off-kilter opener from their latest album, Beyondless. From there, they never really took any sort of real pause, with frontman Elias Bender Ronnenfelt wearing his street pirate garb while stalking about the stage with a softly menacing facial expression while his calm bandmates provided the musical backdrop. While his vocals seemed a bit low at first, and the band’s performance and tone strangely muted, everything seemed to come together within a few songs and sounded much better and true to form before long.

The band played a great mix off all four of their albums, and while the crowd was definitely into it from the get-go, they really started to explode once the band kicked out “The Lord’s Favorite”. Even with its country shuffle, some pit action had stirred up and didn’t relent much for the rest of the 15-song set. Even some audience members outside that action would visibly convulse along with every angular note. The couple of older songs from the band’s more raw and aggressive days they played fit in with the newer stuff perfectly, too.

The closing trio of songs was great, with the band playing back-to-back title tracks from their last two full-lengths before the epic, sneering “Catch It” to close a great set.

Set list (10:04-11:13):