Review: Bartees Strange, Rough Trade – ‘It’s all you can do not to crumble into a puddle of tears’

Bartees Leon Cox Jr. (a.k.a. Bartees Strange) has been on quite the roll. Only a few years ago, Strange was the director of communications for an environmental non-profit in Washington, DC.

During COVID, he quit that career trajectory to dedicate himself to music and to work on becoming the person that he truly wanted to be.

In the short span since then, he’s toured with the likes of Phoebe Bridgers, Courtney Barnett and The National, and has seen both of his full-length albums make some of the biggest best-of-the-year lists.

Now on a loaded schedule of touring around the US and internationally, Strange is shooting for the moon.

The grind of the road takes it out of anybody, but you get the sense that Strange is not one for sitting still too long. At any point during tonight’s set, he can jump from anthemic indie rocker to introspective folk singer to beat-heavy hip-hop act to euphoric house musician.

This identity, of holding so many influences in one, is made clear on his latest album, Farm To Table.

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Album opener Heavy Heart starts with Strange gently plucking out a twinkling melody before the whole band explodes into graceful chorus while Wretched bubbles and fizzes like a coke bottle and then blasts off into an Ibiza foam party.

Strange’s band – bass, synth and pounding drums – keeps up to the point of sounding like the record itself.

Before launching into Hennessy, the swaggered sing-a-long that closes the album, Strange reveals that he originally wrote the song when he was fourteen years old.

At the time, he was just recording himself musing on how many Black artists would sing about drinking Hennessy cognac even though he didn’t want to drink it himself.

Only later in life, he says, did he understand the meaning of the song. Growing up an indie rock kid in small-town Oklahoma, in a predominantly white populace, Strange didn’t see himself reflected back all that often. He wasn’t living up to the Hennessy-swigging hip-hop trope either.

Nearly twenty years later, Strange pulled the song out of storage and realised that his younger self had been struggling with identity. Strange brought his past self into the present day and gave him the space to speak, to be heard and to be appreciated.

It turned out that a lot of the themes he was trying to tackle in his youth he still works on today, though now he can give it a name.

Strange tees up his introspective melodies so beautifully that, when the big riff comes, there’s a feeling of exaltation – exfoliation, even – of giving that feeling the space it deserves rather than denying its existence.

Escape This Circus, for instance, folds you into its warm, calm embrace to later scream your face off. This regard for the quiet–loud dynamic of punk rock likely stems from Strange’s roots in the post-hardcore scene, coming up with Brooklyn band Stay Inside before going solo in 2018.

Sometimes, though, we don’t need the riffs at all. On introducing Hold The Line, a wonderfully sparse track that spotlights Strange’s pained crooning, he explains that he was watching TV when they interviewed George Floyd’s six-year-old daughter, Gianna, following her father’s murder.

The interview reminded him that Black children have to grow up quickly in today’s America. Strange then plays, quietly and methodically.

He holds us so tenderly that – and this might also have something to do with the intimacy of the gig and the venue’s drooping fairy lights – when he reaches the lyric ‘There goes time’, a sentence so deceivingly simple that it’s crushing, it’s all you can do not to crumble into a puddle of tears.

The sooner Bartees Strange returns to Bristol, the better.

Main photo: Rich Kemp

Read next:

• Review: Ben Gregory, Rough Trade – ‘The gig is a celebration’
• Review: Noble Jacks, Lost Horizon – ‘Huge heaps of collective joy’
• Review; Unthank : Smith, Trinity – ‘A master class in song’

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