“Like Some Archangel Alighting” — La Dispute Takes Brooklyn to Church
Reciting the gut-wrenching introduction to La Dispute’s most recent release, No One Was Driving The Car, a spotlight focuses on impassioned vocalist Jordan Dreyer emerging from the dark sidestage: “I shaved my head in the sink / I left the water running.” Suddenly, Dreyer cuts the music - someone in the pit fell to the floor.
No One Was Driving The Car’s fragmented rollout, presented by the Grand Rapids’ natives in a trickle of EPs spanning the summer, culminated with two final tracks to complete the album earlier this month. No stranger to introspective subject matter, La Dispute’s fifth album reflects on surveillance and self-voyeurism, environmental and societal breakdown, suicide, relationship dissolution, and religious rejection.
Undeterred by the heavy material, the 1100-capacity auditorium at Brooklyn’s Warsaw is completely sold out. Per Dreyer’s instructions, security finally pierces the middle of the crowd and evacuates the semi-conscious person.
La Dispute in Brooklyn
“Like some archangel alighting,” to the foreboding, droning backbeat provided by guitarists Chad Morgan-Sterenberg and Corey Stroffolino, bassist Adam Vass, and drummer Brad Vander Lugt, Dreyer leads the sermon and the crowd is praying loudly. Bypassing the false start, La Dispute bounces back into “I Shaved My Head” and No One’s second track, “Man with Hands and Ankles Bound,” a bondage-tinged meditation on relationship anxiety lifted by a killer bassline.
The crowd erupts as the band revisits the iconic angst of the 2011 Wildlife’s “The Most Beautiful Bitter Fruit,” before slinking into “Scenes From Highways 1981-2009” off niche-favorite 2015 release, Rooms of the House. “It’s life, it’s fine / it’s fine, it’s fine,” the crowd raggedly pleas in unison to No One album highlight, “Sibling Fistfight at Mom’s Fiftieth.”
After another stop into Rooms of the House – the emotionally raw “Woman (reading)” – sweat-drenched strangers become enmeshed as the pit expands for La Dispute’s most harrowing hit, “King Park.” Dreyer’s ferocious vocal is instantly matched: “Can I still get into Heaven if I kill myself?,” gets lobbed back at the band with the feverish intensity of those earnestly looking for an answer.
The band slides through “VIEW FROM OUR BEDROOM WINDOW,” off La Dispute’s 2019 lukewarmly-received Panorama, before revving up biblically-fixated tracks, the pays-to-wait explosion “Steve” and rambling “Autofiction Detail,” two songs grounded in the ruins of crumbling people but equally couched in lofty Calvinist allegories.
Careening through confessional old favorites “a letter,” “Andria,” and “Why It Scares Me,” peppered with new selections including the comparatively subdued “I Dreamt of a Room with All My Friends I Could Not Get In,” and desperate title track “No One Was Driving The Car,” Dreyer pauses his effortless two-stepping to make an announcement - the evacuated person is okay! In light of this, La Dispute’s prudent invitation to local community organization Harm Reduction In The Scene (HRITS) to offer life-saving supplies, including test strips and Narcan, shines.
“It becomes incumbent on all of us,” Dreyer emphasizes, “to take whatever this might be, to take it into the world and do what we can no matter how hopeless it might feel.”
Sublimating the relentlessly bleak nature of La Dispute’s set, Dreyer’s call to unity – for mutual-aid, for protecting trans rights, for pit etiquette – in the face of apathy is palpably uplifting: “We gotta keep going, ‘cause what the fuck else is new here?”
Half-suffocated by the humid aura of the venue, the room demands an encore. The band returns to Warsaw’s stage to punctuate their set with the eight-minute exclamation point, “Environmental Catastrophe Film.” Thanking the similarly emo/indie line-blurring openers Tummyache and Glitterer, with their winding stream of consciousness peaking at the intersection of deforestation of trees and beliefs, La Dispute’s hardcore instincts met with their most faithful fans in Brooklyn in rapturous ways.