Supporting the band tonight is Alice Costelloe, whose presence is cozy and full of smiles to her audience, and to her drummer and keyboardist, Matty and Jono. Costelloe soothingly strums a cream-coloured Fender and plays an eight-track set, her voice beautiful as she plays tracks from her 2024 EP, ‘When It’s the Time’, including the title track and ‘I Never Dance’, as well as her 2023 track, ‘Badmouth’.
Costelloe’s set is mellow and thoughtful, her gentle indie-pop makes for the ideal transition into the bouncing tranquillity of Gengahr.
Opening their first-ever Stockton gig with ‘Dizzy Ghosts’, frontman Felix Bushe sings softly before the line “Darling, started out meaning nothing” brings on the swirling, pulsing guitar sequence that gets everybody’s heads nodding in unison. This energy is matched on ‘Where I Lie’, where the instrumentation rises and falls as wavey guitar riffs spiral while Bushe contrastingly sings of the “monster” within.
From the get-go, Gengahr shift us from dance to daze, within songs, just like they do on the album itself. Bushe, Victor and Schulte are all incredible guitarists, who, along with Ward on drums, create a distinctive soundscape within each song, and control the mood with their psychedelic flourishes.
‘She’s a Witch’ conveys the bands’ personality aptly, as its short, wistful verses (“Maybe she’ll sink, maybe she’ll fly / I caught a witch that cries all the time”) are glazed with Bushe’s melodic tone, all before all the drums pick up pace and all three guitarist spin their riffs in a trio of electric wooziness.
It's striking how at ease the four bandmembers are throughout the set. Even on up-tempo tracks like ‘Embers’, they aren’t knocked out of their cool continuum. With that said, they’re far from boring to watch, as they ooze humble confidence and neatly execute their first album, their live versions have an exciting edge when played live that moves them closer to indie-rock than pop.
They’ve often been compared to MGMT, and whilst they hold a similar sound on the surface, Gengahr’s tracks have less ego and more emotion. In comparison to artists that have emerged since their debut, songs like ‘Bathed in Light’ bare likeness to Declan Mckenna, particular on his 2023 album ‘What Happened to the Beach?’ which embraced a more experimental and psychedelic sound. The psych elements of their debut are also reminiscent of New York psych-pop band Crumb, and likewise their carefree nature.
After playing through the entirety of ‘A Dream Outside’ in the same order as the songs appear in the album, they play some tracks 2023’s ‘Red Sun Titans’ and 2020’s ‘Sanctuary’. There’s a noticeable difference between their older and newer tracks: the latter feel more mature, but are unmistakenly Gengahr and equally as catchy.
In their announcement of this tour in November, the band said, “they could think of no better way of paying homage to our debut than getting back into some of the vital grassroots venues that helped us get going on this journey”. This makes the show even more special in performance but also in sentiment, as they're 10 years in and still appreciating the foundations of their roots.
They finish with ‘Heavenly Maybe’, a chilled bop from ‘Sanctuary’, released five years after ‘A Dream Outside’, proving that they’ve progressed whilst staying tethered to psychedelia. Ending the show this way makes it feel well rounded, and look a chronological journey from 2015 to today, and keeps us hooked for the next decade.
