Scene Report: Live Geese, Mitski, Elvis Costello

Plus: A Weak Tame Impala Album Continues The 2010s Era Indie Class' Losing Streak

Let’s talk live music! I saw two shows this week that I then wrote/talked about. The first is Geese, my band of 2025, who I saw for the second time (first time headlining) last Saturday. I had a really, really good time. But beyond my personal affection for the lads, I think it’s fair to call this the hottest indie tour of the year.

As I wrote at Uproxx:

There might be bands that make more money or play bigger venues or garner better (or at least equally good) reviews in 2025. But in terms of juice — that intangible but indisputable feeling that you are witnessing a show you’ll still be talking about in 10 or 20 or even more years — then it’s hard to think of any act in the indie space that can touch Geese at the moment.

This can, for instance, be quantified by the sorts of ticket prices that brokers (i.e. scalpers) are asking for on the secondary market. Nearly $1,200 per general admission ticket in Detroit. Between $900 and about $1,150 in Los Angeles. In Madison, the $250 ticket price must have seemed like a steal. In each case, it’s obvious that the rapid scaling up of Geese’s popularity has swiftly exceeded the venues they were booked into this season. And this has just as obviously created a sense of urgency that’s compelled some fans to consider sacrificing part of their monthly rental money to see this band right as they enter the peak of their powers. If you love Geese, seeing them now, in 2025, on the Getting Killed tour, is a top priority.

I wish I could somehow counteract all that hype and, in the spirit of fiscal responsibility, lower the temperature. But I’m afraid I can’t. I caught them in 2024 open for King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, but that was in an arena and a relatively short set. Seeing Geese headline a club packed with eager acolytes, meanwhile, was an entirely different ballgame. It has to be one of my very favorite live experiences of the past several years. If I hadn’t seen Oasis play an epic reunion concert at Wembley Stadium this summer, Geese would, hands down, be my top rock show of the year. But even with that Oasis gig, a concert I had looked forward to for literally years, Geese is awfully, awfully close. It’s one thing to see an old favorite make an unlikely comeback. It’s another to witness a group of extremely talented musicians in their early 20s who are creating a legacy in real time.

Now, to be clear, I recommend not going into debt just to buy a ticket to a rock concert. But seeing Geese last weekend in a club reminded me why I still care about seeing rock bands in clubs. Sometimes it’s fun and sometimes you wish you had stayed home. But when it works — and I mean really works — it can be just about the most exciting thing you can imagine.

A few days later, I saw a much different show: Elvis Costello. Over at Never Ending Stories, I talked at length about how much Costello meant to me as a teenager. This was in the early ’90s, when Elvis was entering the middle stage of his career. Not quite his peak, which occurred roughly between 1977 and ’86, but still quite good. The run of albums that includes Brutal Youth, All This Useless Beauty, and Painted From Memory is still pretty dear to me. At the time, he was the first wordy, lyrics-forward singer-songwriter I ever loved, my Bob Dylan before I could wrap my head around Bob Dylan (which didn’t happen until I was in college).

On the podcast, I went on a riff I might develop more at some point in written form, about how the legacies of canonized artists go up and down like stocks. A small handful (Dylan, The Beatles, Neil Young) are like Apple or Costco, just perennially steady and in favor. But most go up or down with each new generation deciding which old music is relevant to them. When I was a teenager, I was pointed toward the great British rock bands (The Stones, Who, Zeppelin, Floyd, etc.), all of which seem less relevant now to younger people who instead prefer Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac, neither of which were particularly cool in the ’90s.

I find this whole process of constantly evolving legacies to be really fascinating. In terms of Elvis Costello, he was definitely someone that you had to care about if you were serious about rock music when I first start paying attention. He was, essentially, sold to me as the punk-rock Dylan, a distinction that in my mind still holds even as his reputation seems sort of nonexistent among the under-45 set.

I go on more about this on the pod. But about the show: Going in, I had been warned that Elvis’ voice is diminished. At age 70 and in the aftermath of a recent cancer scare, how could it not be? To be sure, he sounded out of breath on the fast numbers early in the set, wonderful songs like “Mystery Dance” and “Lip Service” where he was backed by two old compatriots from the Attractions, Pete Thomas on drums and Steve Nieve on keys, as well as the great Charlie Sexton on guitar. Frankly, as a person who had only seen Elvis once before this, I was surprised that he was playing the songs just like he did in the late ’70s, at a high velocity, when it was obvious that this was probably not a great idea. To be sure, when the music got a little slower and quieter later in the set, his voice markedly improved.

I couldn’t help but think of Dylan, who turned 84 this year and has constantly shaped his music to suit his current age. Almost all of his peers meanwhile try to be some version of themselves from decades earlier. But Dylan as never indulged the public’s fantasies about their heroes never getting any older. Elvis seemed to fall into that same trap at times, even though the older and more weathered 2025 model, potentially, has plenty of other things to offer.

FURTHER READING

Over at Uproxx, I wrote about the new Mitski concert film The Land, which screened in cinemas this week and will (presumably) be available to stream somewhere in the future. She also put out an really good live album to accompany the release. The movie and record were good excuses for me to ruminate on one of the best artists going right now, and my own history with her:

In 2017, I visited a mid-budget hotel near the Mall Of America in suburban Minneapolis to interview Mitski for my podcast. The night before, I watched her play a sold-out show at a local rock club. She was, at the time, a critical favorite just starting to become indie-famous. Her most recent album, Puberty 2, made year-end lists but didn’t top them. I was a fan, though I wouldn’t have predicted the path her career would eventually take. She was just a really good artist, I thought, not necessarily a budding pop superstar.

For about a half hour, we talked in her hotel room while her band was off riding the mall’s indoor roller coaster. Two things were immediately apparent: She was one of the most self-possessed musicians I’d ever met, and she was determined to not go along with the crowd. “I have a hard time joining scenes, like music scenes or art scenes,” she told me. “I have a better time collecting friends that I connect with on an individual level and just created my own spread-out community.”

I thought about that interview while watching Mitski: The Land, a new concert movie set to screen exclusively in theaters nationwide on Wednesday. It was impossible not to notice how far she’s come: The Land was filmed over three nights in 2024 at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, during the tour in support of her most recent album, 2023’s stunning The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We. That record features “My Love Mine All Mine,” the viral hit that has streamed more than 1.7 billion times on Spotify and exposed Mitski to a much different (and younger) audience than the millennial indie fans who populated that Minneapolis gig eight years ago. This is evidenced early in The Land, when Mitski stops to thank the parents in attendance for escorting their kids to the show, after which she gently addresses the rest of the audience in a cadence best described as “Ms. Rachel goes to art school.”

And then there’s the prescient substance of our interview, particularly the part about being her own island. That’s precisely what she is in The Land — dressed simply in black slacks and white top, she moves about a starkly decorated stage alone, with members of her excellent seven-piece band situated on the outer edges. On film, director Grant James takes a cue from Andi Watson’s minimalist stage design by emphasizing Mitski’s singularity, framing her at a remove from the audience and her fellow musicians. She is, in almost every shot, holding all our attention; When James cuts to the band, he keeps her out of the frame. Otherwise, Mitski’s most prominent on-screen co-stars are the two chairs she deploys as props at center stage.

It’s a fascinating contrast with the biggest concert film of the decade, 2023’s Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. That movie is designed to show off the enormity of the subject’s fame, with endless sweeping overhead stadium shots where tens of thousands of delirious Swifties genuflect at the altar of Taylor. It is meant to be a worshipful monument to Taylor Swift As One-Woman Monoculture, a representation of Pop Fandom As Community. But Mitski, as she said, is a woman apart. In The Land, she’s building a world, her own world. And she’s inviting you to watch her move through that world. Though, importantly, she doesn’t necessarily extend that invitation to join her there.

Thankfully, watching Mitski is more than enough. She has become, years after playing rock clubs and staying at mid-budget hotels on the edge of town, the rare indie star who has earned the big-screen treatment.

FURTHER LISTENING

On the latest Indiecast, Ian and I talked about Deadbeat, the new album by Tame Impala that’s been (to quote Geese) “getting killed” by some critics as a weak-sauce spin on dance music. I wouldn’t call it a bad record, exactly, but it’s pretty boring most of the time and by far the weakest Tame Impala LP to date.

I’m a fan of Kevin Parker going back to their 2010 debut Innerspeaker, and the through line for his records up to now has been an unerring knack for snappy singles. Whether he’s working in a psych-rock vein or pursuing the electro-R&B direction that made him rich and famous, he’s always boasted a bounty of melodies and hooks. So the relative dearth of both on Deadbeat strikes me as a deliberate decision. The intention, it seems, is the pursuit of the trance-like, hypnotic quality that rave music has, where it’s more about the overall experience that the pithy individual pieces. But I don’t think that’s his strength, as the album bears out.

Deadbeat also belongs in the recent conversation about 2010s era indie artists having a bad year in 2025, which I wrote about last month: “To my ears, these records are also linked by their production styles (half-baked and/or overblown), songwriting quality (mixed-to-uninspired) and vibe (underlying tentativeness that feels a lot like artistic aimlessness). Put another way: The juice just isn’t there.” The same can be said of Tame Impala’s latest.

RECOMMENDATION CORNER

This Indianapolis band is named after a Guided By Voices song. More specifically, a Tobin Sprout song from Alien Lanes, my favorite album of all time (and the inspiration for the name of this newsletter). So I was already on board before pushing play on their new album. But then I was really on board once I heard how well they execute the admittedly well-worn jangle-pop formula, which is hard to make sound fresh but when it works (as it does here) it goes down really easy.