Home Is Where, Greet Death and Foxing
Basement East // Nashville, TN // July 5, 2022
Photos by Kendra Petersen Kamp // Review by Jordan Petersen Kamp
Foxing’s music has long had a paradoxical relationship with itself. The St. Louis multi-hyphenate (indie, emo, post, art, whatever) rock group make massive songs that are often about the emotional and financial costs of making massive songs. They have gone for broke on each of the four albums they have released over the last decade and are more candid about the literal nature of that phrase than most bands. “When I fall into a spiraling debt, gentle is the drop when you tell me I’m enough, as impossible as it felt,” sings vocalist Conor Murphy on the title track from 2021’s spectacular Draw Down the Moon, returning to a recurring notion that when the music fades, Foxing is unsure that there will be enough of themselves left to foot the bill.
Home Is Where
There is perhaps no better way to realize Foxing’s music than at a live concert. Not just because the band are fantastic performers, but also because the entire balance sheet of being a touring rock band is on display: there is money invested in an inventory of merchandise that won’t translate to cash if ticket sales are low, they have fuel and other production costs to consider, and the music has to transcend all of this. At a Foxing show, it always does.
Greet Death
The band began their first headlining tour in three years at Basement East in Nashville, TN on July 5, 2022, supported by the caustic Florida-based Home is Where and the dour Michigan band Greet Death. After being played onto stage by an ominous, Hans Zimmer-esqe soundscape, Foxing opened their set with the first three songs from Draw Down the Moon before transitioning to groupings of songs from each of their other three albums. As this is their first headlining tour since Draw Down the Moon’s release, that album was the backbone for the set, but at an hour-and-a-half long there was plenty of room for older material, including some live rarities such as “Bit by a Dead Bee, Pt. I” from 2014’s The Albatross.
Foxing
It may be difficult to imagine the somber post-rock of an album like Dealer billowing around the poppier boundaries of songs from Draw Down the Moon, but careful sequencing and savvy compositions ensured everything was in its right place. Foxing’s diversity in sound creates plenty of room for an audience to enjoy the show however they choose—those wishing to sing along to the arena-sized choruses of songs like “Draw Down the Moon” and “Beacons” or shake a little booty to the sexier songs from 2018’s Nearer My God both found what they were looking for in Nashville.
The set culminated in the colossal Draw Down the Moon closer “Speak with the Dead,” a multi-part, fantasmic prog-rock song about grief and connection. On record the song is kaleidoscopic, casting grief as prismatic and discrete. In the live rendition, the band brings the song into a doom-metal dirge. The result is more immediate and visceral, a perfect reinterpretation for their live show, where the distance between the white-knuckle fervor of the band and the audience is collapsed into nothing and the emotional cost of performing such a song is immediately met with the gentle drop of the audience telling the band that they are enough, as impossible as it feels.
So go see Foxing on this tour and lose or find yourself in the music. And then buy a T-shirt.
