Tumblrcore Tourdom: La Dispute and Title Fight co-headlined Union Transfer

Title Fight | photo by Rachel Del Sordo

The Title Fight / La Dispute co headlining tour seemed to be the pinnacle of tumblrcore tourdom. Both bands had made huge strides in the in the punk and post-hardcore world and this paring seemed to encompass everything the genres have to offer. How well the tour actually went over, though, is up for debate.

The show opened up with The Hotelier, a band who seems to be totally unescapable these days. This was the sixth time I have seen the band in the past year; I wasn’t exactly trying to see them once every other month, it just happened and I am okay with that. Their breakthrough album – Home, Like No Place is There  – received much acclaim for being one of them most thoughtful and well balanced emo / pop punk albums in recent years.

Trading punk rock time for chaperon time, this show started even before its scheduled start time of 7:30, so I missed The Hotelier’s first couple songs. As I walked in, I noticed the band was playing decently harder than normal, maybe a sign of things to come for the much-anticipated follow up to Home, Like No Place is There. Their performance was solid as usual but, setlist wise, it was no different from the previous five times I saw them this year. I guess I should expect their performances to blend together at this point.

Kingston, Pa hardcore band Title Fight made a huge genre switch with their new album Hyperview. Definitely not the bands most inspired work, the album offers one monotone shoegazey track after another. Each song is decent on its own, but the album as a whole lacks variety and I was hoping their live performance didn’t fall down the same path. This performance brought a much tighter sound than I have seen in earlier Title Fight shows and an overall more mature live set. Though the band was mixing old and new songs, their set seemed to fell into the doldrums of similar sounding new songs. It also seemed as though their departure into shoegaze took the punk right out of their old stuff as well. The audience felt less excited overall about the band then in shows past. It struck me as odd that this was a co headlining tour; Philadelphia is normally treated like a hometown show for the band, and they did not close. Overall, it seemed like everyone wanted more from the band.

Grand Rapids, Michigan post-hardcore band La Dispute are showmen, no question about it. If you ever have a chance to see this band live, I wouldn’t pass it up. The band’s spoken-word punk makes for an incredibly dramatic live performance from frontman Jordan Dreyer. The band spoke very little in between songs, just playing track after track, mostly from their latest album Rooms of the House. The best parts came at the beginning and end of the set. They opened with “King Park,” the seven-minute epic off 2011’s Wildlife. This song just lends itself to an intense live performance, espeically as the song built up to its iconic bridge “Will I still get into heaven if I kill myself?” Dreyer preformed it with his back to the audience; the whole thing just gave me chills. For their encore, La Dispute played “The Last Lost Continent” off their sophomore album Somewhere at the Bottom of the River, Between Vega and Altair – a definite fan favorite.  It shared a lot of the emotional builds as “King Park,” but was the bands only encore as the concert ended before 11pm. Chaperones, man.