It doesn’t take long for the exuberant US band leader Bartees Cox Jr, AKA Bartees Strange, to remove his bass and jump into the audience, hustling the crowd into movement. He’s the sort of frontman – genial, casually commanding – who can break ice fast, a skill probably honed during his time playing in New York hardcore bands. His current outfit’s slew of back-to-back Texas gigs at the music industry festival South by Southwest the other week has also served as a warm-up for this short, but resonant, UK tour.
It helps, too, that the banger his four-strong outfit are playing – mostly on drum pads and synths – has a chorus so nagging it takes just a second to worm into your ear. Flagey God, off Strange’s first album, Live Forever, was named after a feeling that once came over him in Place Eugène Flagey in Brussels. He was so unanchored from his usual contexts, and therefore from expectations, that he felt he could do anything, be anything. In that square, he was a god.
The R&B chorus, meanwhile, beams in from a love song. “Girl, you asked me if I get that deja vu – I do with you,” chants Cox, quickly accompanied by 600 people, “I do with you.”
Leaping into things, and swerving expectations, are his specialist offering. Born in Suffolk, England, where his father was a US serviceman – “You can probably tell from the accent,” he quips – Cox grew up in Oklahoma, often the only Black kid around. He spent his 20s in New York and Washington DC in proper jobs, working for an environmental organisation; he was a deputy press secretary in the Federal Communications Commission during the Obama administration. But while Cox excelled at adulting, he craved an outlet for his restless musicianship. The pandemic offered an opportunity to seize the day. He put out an EP of covers of songs by his favourite band, the National.
The response to that – and a deal with the National’s UK label, 4AD – allowed Cox to quit the day job and throw himself into upending preconceptions about himself, and who should enjoy what kinds of music. That mission has produced two well-received albums, 2020’s Live Forever and last year’s Farm to Table. (The latter title sums up Cox’s journey from the rural south and southwest to having “a seat at the table”.) Both have refreshed indie rock, a genre we can argue about for hours, while simultaneously knowing what it usually entails. The refreshing process probably began roughly a decade ago when a series of new voices, from Mitski to Japanese Breakfast, came along to subtly alter US indie rock’s DNA.
It also inducted Bartees Strange into a venerable club, one that is always bigger than it first appears: that of people of colour playing alternative guitar music. Kele Okereke from Bloc Party and TV on the Radio are two artists Cox has cited as figures who gave him permission to be more himself; Alabama Shakes, and our own Michael Kiwanuka and Devonté Hynes (AKA Blood Orange) are more artists who have overcome genre preconceptions of their own. Tonight, Cox plays two National covers – Lemonworld and About Today – both of which start off quiet and build to loud choruses: textbook widescreen alternative rock, given a rich makeover.
Even though the DC hardcore band Bad Brains are another obvious shout, it’s instructive to note how pivotal At the Drive-in – the Latinx-heritage prog-punk band – were on Cox’s guitar playing. There are as many as three guitars in the set-up tonight, and a small conurbation of effects pedals for each guitarist. Cox himself can be an exquisitely delicate player – the filigree he inserts into Mulholland Drive, a song about not liking LA, is effortlessly graceful.
But an evening spent in his company does jump around a lot, and the fact that he and his band can play the hell out of their instruments means that they sometimes do a little too much. There are gnarlier thickets where the focus of the song is mislaid, or passages that foreground how indie rock can still sometimes be a bit meat-and-potatoes, no matter who is playing it.
Mostly, though, Bartees Strange’s output is exhilarating. Flagey God is a pop song with a persuasive groove and a chillwave debt. Wretched, from Farm to Table, is another bop – all heart-on-sleeve struggle in the verses, pure thankful euphoria in the chorus, the kind of song that makes you wonder whether Cox might end up being tapped by A-listers for songwriting duties. Hopefully, he will soon be able to afford a guitar tech – Cox rolls his eyes at how often he needs to tune his instrument on stage.
The stickier bits can’t quite obfuscate the big emotions of Cox’s songs. Hold the Line is a tender, mournful tune he wrote after seeing Gianna Floyd, daughter of George, on TV talking about her father’s murder. Heavy Heart is another emotional anthem made for bigger venues than this bijou box, its dynamic guitars starting off nebulously, then ringing like bells, underlining once again how porous genres are.
