REVIEW: Good Luck! underscores’ Hometown Tour is an Unforgettable Night of Chaos
UNDERSCORES, THE EXCEPTIONAL HYPERPOP PERSONA — of April Harper Grey, is currently promoting her newest album Wallsocket on her Hometown Tour. underscores: An artist whose show at San Francisco’s The Independent completely sold out on a Tuesday night; who maneuvers the stage, her electric guitar, and every pedal and board on her own; who has already mastered the craft of crowd control and engineers her own hype and screams.
Nobody can exaggerate how good an underscores show can be.
Grey masters the maximalism of performance as much as hyperpop itself does. It was a concert, yes, but was also a short film screening, a Dance Dance Revolution session, a human calibration test, and a hyperpop communion. Every aspect of her performance is full of deliberate effort and aesthetic expression.
She began her show with a scene from Dex & River, a Carlosknowsnot-animation where Dex (gabbystart) and River (underscores) play DDR to introduce her opening song, “Cops and robbers.” Each song had its own visual– digitized fishes, an iPhone video of landscapes from a moving car, sketch cartoons that make it clear that Grey was a child of early 2000s Youtube.
The crowd was well primed for underscores thanks to opener Jedwill, a Bay Area DJ who covered Zedd’s “Clarity,” Owl City’s “Fireflies,” and Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone” back to back to back. (You can paint a picture of the raver euphoria that instilled in everybody.)
There's no doubt that underscores’ ability to mobilize her cult-following during a show is impressive, but it’s something special when the crowd has so much chemistry with each other that they orchestrate themselves. When a slide reading “OPEN UP THE PIT” projected on the screen, I giggled a little, because it was so clear that Grey doesn’t even have to ask for the crowd to do so. The crowd was so alive, proving it with each slam of their body. Each person sang even the spoken adlibs in “Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” and the sampled flairs like “Everybody has bad days, don’t worry!” from “You don’t even know who i am.”
There’s this unspoken knowing amongst fans of underscores. “The next song is ‘Johnny johnny johnny.’ If you have to leave the room, please do so now,” read one of her visual slides. The crowd began to chant “Fuck Johnny!” alluding to the song’s matter of a groomer relationship, just like friends would do in a bedroom rant session. The venue boomed with a cultish repetition of “Arms/body/legs/flesh/skin/bone/sinew/good luck!” at the sound of her encore, “Locals (girls like us).”
underscores deserves a much bigger stage than The Independent. She’s already played Lollapalooza’s main stage, Corona Capital, and Electric Forest– the show she pulls off may be a telltale sign that it’s not long before she starts performing in much bigger places.
Check out a gallery of photos from the night by photographer Chloe Catajan below.
