La Dispute @ Metro, Chicago, IL
Photos & review courtesy of Micki Harris | November 18 2019
Last weekend, La Dispute embarked on their fall tour with long time friends and creative collaborators, Touche Amore, as well as Philadelphia native noise punk band, Empath. The tour is promoting Panorama, La Dispute’s fourth studio album which was released in March of this year. As Panorama would be their first new album since Rooms of the House in 2014, the anticipation and the release brought a wave of pent enthusiasm.
Though the new record is brassier than any of their previous works, La Dispute has stayed consistent in what makes them them. After 15 years of making music, listeners can still turn to La Dispute for intense, dark, poetic storytelling accompanied by intricate compositions, often with atypical time signatures. They speak of grief and agony, as they’ve been doing all these years, making their live shows a space for release.
As usual, their set ignited an emotional fire in the crowd, in a room packed from wall to wall. The majority of their setlist were songs from Panorama but made sure to throw in some deep cuts, like “How I Feel” and “Why it Scares Me” from their 2010 split with Touche Amore, joined onstage by Jeremy Bolm, Touche’s vocalist. For their encore, they came back onstage with “The Last Lost Continent,” a 10 minute song off their earliest record, Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair. It then became clear how dedicated the room full of fans were and how long they’d all been a part of La Dispute’s journey.
The tour will be travelling across the US through mid-December and I highly recommend trying to make it out to the show nearest you. Check out photos from the Metro show below:
