The Riviera Theatre is a beautiful room: a former vaudeville house in Uptown Chicago that holds about 2,400 people and has been hosting rock shows for decades. On April 11, it was filled with Snail Mail fans who had waited — some of them five years, from the Valentine tour — to hear what Lindsey Jordan had made next. The answer is Ricochet, and the live context clarified some things about the album that the studio recording kept ambiguous.
Opener Avalon Emerson & the Charm was the first revelation of the evening. Emerson's electronic music has a particular quality — it sounds like it was made for listening and keeps surprising you live — and the Charm formation, which includes live instrumentation alongside the electronics, gave the set a warmth that pure DJ sets lack. By the time Snail Mail took the stage at 9:40, the room was exactly ready.
Jordan opened with 'Tractor Beam,' the first track on Ricochet, and played the album more or less sequentially for the first half of the set. 'Dead End' hit hardest — the studio recording had suggested a big guitar moment, and live, with the rhythm section given room to breathe, it became something close to anthemic. 'Agony Freak' was the surprise of the new material: a song that reads as mid-tempo on record revealed itself live as something genuinely unsettling, Jordan's guitar producing a sound that the mix on the album had somewhat flattened.
The second half of the set moved into older material — 'Pristine' from Lush, 'Anytime' from Valentine — and the crowd's response shifted gear accordingly. These songs, which are five-plus years old at this point, have accumulated the weight of many listens, and Jordan played them with the ease of someone who has made peace with the fact that some of her songs will always be more beloved than the new ones. She didn't seem bothered by it. Neither were we.
Sharp Pins opened the evening and deserved better placement in the lineup: their energetic, spiky indie rock was somewhat lost on an audience that was still filing in during their set. Catch them headlining somewhere smaller if you get the chance. This tour ends May 15 in Salt Lake City.
