It’s quite impressive how much this band has grown in a short amount of time! I remember seeing them at the Troubadour two years ago, opening for Young the Giant, and the size of the crowd then had nothing to do with this insane amount of people packed at Make Music Pasadena. Grouplove was headlining the festival and since the police wanted to let the sidewalks open, they were constantly chasing walkers trying to see something and people filled up the adjacent streets, most of them probably not seeing much. Wow, are they so huge suddenly?
Not that sudden, as they were coming back from a year-and-a-half-long tour, so they have had the time to spread their hippie-happy sound everywhere, but in LA (or Pasadena) they were coming back home. ‘We are Grouplove and we are from here’, they said at the beginning of their set.
I was walking back and forth along the sidewalk during the first half of their performance, as the police wouldn’t let me stand still, but I managed to find a spot close to the stage later on, squeezing my way through a sea of people packed like sardines.
What to say about their music that hasn’t been already said? Probably not much, it is super uplifting, super dynamic, the energy exulting from each member is exuberant from start to finish, and so it is difficult to resist to all that jumping-clapping-smiling-singing-along… I think the confetti or fireworks machine guns were the only things missing to their performance, because they only seem to want to uplift your mood to the roof, boost your dopamine level and burst your neurons,… in an almost excessive way… How many bombastic songs can you endure in one set? If you go see Grouplove you have to endure a lot since almost all their tunes are built to make you raise you hands in the air, sing at the top of your lungs, make you happy as if you had drunk the Kool-Aid… err with Cults playing before and all these scientologists scrolling the festival, I thought I was seeing a theme.
Vocalists Hannah Hooper, who was wearing a long lace dress, and hippie-looking Christian Zuccono, who had even put some purple in his hair, were the driving energy, but basically all members had that same bottomless dynamism; the drummer even jumped in the crowd at the end of the show to hug a few people. With this ad-nauseam-joy the band wanted to spread everywhere, most of the songs had this moment of madness during which everyone was screaming and jumping with some furious head banging.
They played songs from their debut album ‘Never Trust a Happy Song’, and from their self-titled EP, and of course their popular ‘Colours’ and ‘Naked Kids’ were received like some new youth anthems for the juvenile crowd around me, and a song called ‘Slow’ before the encore ended up in some drumming psychedelia. Closer, they were quite ear-splitting, and when I got close to the stage and tried to film a song, the sound turned horrible because of the loudness of the music. They played a new tune, which turned to be as spaghetti-western-epic as the other ones, and they paid homage to Whitney Houston with a few lines of ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’.
I couldn’t stop thinking, Grouplove is big now, they have a crew to tune up their guitars and they have opted for the bombastic power poppy style that will make them play stadium-arenas soon. Now we have to see how long they can ride this happy buoyant wave.
