Concert Review: Turnstile

I often get frustrated by St. Louis. Often my music tastes seem deeply out of line with what sells out the large venues here. So I was pleasantly surprised to see that Turnstile’s Turnstile Love Connection Tour sold out The Pageant. A Baltimore band that seems to get cred almost exclusively from hardcore scene stalwarts and elite music publications like NPR and Pitchfork doesn’t seem too much like St. Louis’s pace. But this tour was not just any tour, it was an eclectic gathering of Baltimore’s finest featuring alternative hip-hop artist JPEGMAFIA and indie rock darling Snail Mail. I should have known just based on the lineup to check all my expectations at the doors.

The inclusion of JPEGMAFIA with his bombastic beat production at first might seem the most puzzling piece of this tour. For sure, looking back from the photo pit to see, the dozens of white suburban teenage boys lining the barrier made me question whether I had come to the right show. Their repeated chants of “Peggy!” before his set only, um, freaked me out more. But it was clear when Barrington DeVaughn Hendricks took the stage with short devil horns on his baseball cap and introduced himself as “JPEGMOTHERFUCKINMAFIA”, that he DGAF. What followed was Hendricks bringing true punk energy, running and jumping across the stage while spitting to the cacophony of sounds coming from his laptop. Oh, and he covered “Call Me Maybe”, so advantage: Peggy.

I should have known Snail Mail would have a vibrant showing as she had played St. Louis earlier at sister venue Delmar Hall. That still couldn’t prevent the whiplash when teenage white boys were promptly replaced by young adult indie chicks. Lindsey Jordan certainly slowed things down, but I was more than willing to let her lower the bpm in the room with songs from her fantastic recent release, Valentine. There’s a high chance people from the balcony could see me grooving in the photo pit during “Ben Franklin”.

I’ve seen my share of hardcore bands in my day, and yet I never would have expected one to play The Pageant, arguably the premier concert venue in St. Louis. But that’s the thing I should have realized about Turnstile: they aren’t your typical hardcore band. They had a rap artist and indie musician support them on tour. They had Whitney Houston’s seminal “I Want to Dance With Somebody” play in full before their set. And they bathed the stage in magenta lights with rainbow accents. This isn’t to say they don’t encapsulate the hardcore spirit. Aggressive guitars courtesy of Pat McCroy and recent addition touring guitarist Greg Cerwonka layered on top of driving rhythm lines provided by Franz Llyons and Daniel Fang brought the electricity of every hardcore band I saw in a cramped dive bar slash venue to the most reputable stage in St. Louis (Fang, who also recently toured with Charli XCX after she saw him perform with the band on TV, even had his own designated time to solo). Most hardcore bands capture this energy not simply through their music, but through the coaxing of their vocalist. For me, it’s the most exhausting part of a hardcore show if I’m being frank. An already intimidating frontman growling at you, demanding in almost hostile tones, grimace on his face, with the zeal of a charismatic tent revivalist, that you return their enthusiasm for yours. Lead singer bravado is taken to insufferable lengths at hardcore shows, and yet it is a time-honored tradition. Turnstile vocalist Brendan Yates subverts all of these expectations. Stage banter was sparse from Yates save for, “Hello. We are a band called Turnstile from Baltimore” and the occasional crowd check of “We good?”. Yes, Yates was verbally muted in between songs but this was absolutely not indicative of his enthusiasm. His stage presence has always been expressive (a quick dive into any hate5six videos on YouTube will prove this immediately) but for this tour, he has seemed much more…freer. There’s no aggression as he moves across the stage, rather his leaps and his spins and that thing he does when he circles his arms around each other or when he tosses the mic back and forth between his hands exude an almost pure youthful joy that cannot be contained. In a masterclass of frontman modeling, Yates’ carefreeness on stage becomes invitational, it gives the audience permission to join him in his exuberance. Truthfully, invitation and inclusion were forefront of the aim of this tour, beyond the visual signaling of the rainbow lights, the band practices what they preach, ending the night with the tour’s namesake single, filling the stage with as many members from the audience as they could, all belting out at the top of their lungs the mantra of the evening:

“I want to thank you for letting me see myself.
I want to thank you for letting me be myself.”

The punk and hardcore music community has often espoused values of welcome and hospitality, especially for the outsider, but that spirit always seems self-defeating with how the message is often conveyed. It seems like Turnstile is at the forefront of truly blowing those gates wide open for all to come on in.