Foxwarren
Underground Arts
1200 Callowhill St.
Philadelphia
Sept. 25, 2025
Over the years I’ve seen Andy Shauf a few times – once at Solar Myth when it was still Boot & Saddle, once at PhilaMOCA, and once at Union Transfer, the respective sizes of those venues neatly matching his career trajectory. But the show I most often think of is that B&S set, when he was touring in support of his album The Party late in 2018, along with Chris Cohen. I’ve never seen such a metatextual performance, certainly not where the material wasn’t autobiographical (thinking of the smoldering tension you might feel from a band filled with current or former lovers, singing to and about each other): “I stood in the room that I’d created,” Shauf sang at the murderous climax of “Wendell Walker," and there we stood, in that room, as though blood was slowly pooling at our collective feet.
That line was as autobiographical as the artist really got, his songs then and now made up of fictional characters and concept-album narrative conceits, and the music – the power of his lyric-writing, especially – was working on an entirely different level live in the room that night, transporting the audience quite literally into the album. It was a profound and memorable experience I’ve never quite felt since, like we’d all been Jumanjied into Shauf’s world, like we were awake and dreaming at the same time. (Or, more accurately, like there was immense slippage between the two states, like “real” and “imagined” were no longer distinct.)
Outside of his extensive solo career, Shauf plays with Canadian quintet Foxwarren. The imperative at a Foxwarren show is more full-bodied than Shauf's independent work is. While heady in their own way, the band first and foremost trades in groove, gait, lilt, swoon, release, and sound for its own sake. This is music to move your body to, timbres to give you chills and scratch itches. (You won’t catch Shauf inviting the crowd to dance before launching into his songs about the imagined creepy stalker-killer of his 2023 album, Norm.)
The show began with a set from the great singer-songwriter Allegra Krieger, who I’ve also seen a few times, but before now always at houses or small venues. Performing alone, mostly accompanying herself on electric guitar (and briefly on keys for a couple songs), Krieger got right down to business: she barreled through an intense set of songs, eyes barely open and always cast downward and she played and sang, only briefly speaking and stealing glances at the crowd between songs – friendly, but always right back to the music, which was tightly coiled, songs made of unrelenting stretch. Her dynamic guitar playing, the sound distorting as she picked hard, reminded me of sped-up, time-lapsed film of saturated flowers blooming. Moments of cathartic release were brief, like the last flicker of flame combusting, returning to a grey tension that was pervasive and willful. Some songs were almost entirely composed of incessant melody, winding and breathless, as strong, beautiful and dangerous as a spider’s web, rhymes landing like body blows. To make the usual comparisons of who or what it was reminiscent of – Elliott Smith, Joni Mitchell with an altogether darker harmonic vocabulary – would only lend credence to the similar scope of her vision. It was a mesmerizing, hypnotizing performance.
As Foxwarren took the stage, my friend Lila, in town from New York, described the crowd as “a sea of stiffness” (and shouted, “Put that in your notes!”) but that didn’t last long: the band opened the floor up with the twilit, mellow soul of “Dance”: “If we don’t move our feet / We will be too late / Baby, don’t contemplate / All I really wanna do is dance / Don’t you want to dance?” The song opens the band’s new, appropriately-named second album, 2, and is one of several songs where Shauf sings about dancing; naturally, this point is taken even more to heart live, made more manifest. This is a muscular, grooving band, pivoting like Olajuwon from the light-on-its-feet bounce of “Say This” (closing with an inventive Ebow-strummed, fuzzed-out solo from lead guitarist Dallas Bryson, which left me positively beaming) to the genuine T.Rex swagger of “Listen2me," a head-banging highlight. Lila and I watched the show from an angle where Shauf was mostly hidden behind a pillar, like a secret member, playing up that this was truly a band effort; the three-part harmonies between Shauf, Bryson and keyboardist Colin Nealis were such a perfect, sun-kissed, AM-gold blend that you’d think we’d dropped the needle on a CSN record.
These wizards from Saskatchewan looked at each other throughout the set, with frequent, wide, teeth-flashing smiles from drummer Avery Kissick (who took an invigorating drum solo at one point, with tom rolls that would have done Bonham proud), and the occasional gentle smirk from Shauf. On mic, he invited the crowd’s dancers to step up before the band dove into the deep groove and perfect, “Day Tripper”-on-speed guitar riff at the heart of “Deadhead”; Lila and I swung each other around to the tune of the band singing “Don’t stop dancing / Don’t stop dancing with me” until the song stopped its own momentum, devolving into its coda of hazy psych, sawtooth synths and noisy samples. Live, Foxwarren provide the most wonderful answer to the heady, literary artistry of Shauf’s solo work. Too often indie rock is overly serious – I’m guilty of this too – and it’s so great to see a band play music that’s as fun to move to as it is to think about.
