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Concert Review

ARTIST: Eihwar

DATE: September 14 2026

VENUE: The Complex

SUPPORTING ACT: FRAYLE

CITY: Salt Lake City, Utah

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There are sounds that don’t just enter your ears. They hit the soft machinery behind your ribs like a round from a large-caliber rifle stopped by a Kevlar plate. The vest does its job. You’re still standing. But the kinetic force spreads out in a perfect, ugly bloom across your chest and you feel every cracked rib and every bruised organ screaming that something ancient just tried to kill you and failed. That is Viking folk music when it is done right. Not the cleaned-up festival version. The real thing. The kind that smells like wet leather, woodsmoke, and blood under the fingernails.

I used to chase that feeling with bagpipes. Nothing else in my youth could open the vein of pure, useless melancholy the way a lone piper could. Then the show Vikings happened, and Wardruna, and Heilung, and Eivør, and suddenly the old northern gods had a new frequency. The pipes still work, but the northern sound hits different. It doesn’t ask permission. It just arrives, plants its feet in the center of your sternum, and starts rearranging the furniture.

Months ago an email landed about a French duo called Eihwar. The reply came back cold: they don’t do interviews in English. I kept them on the radar anyway. Then the tour dates arrived, and a live clip, and I watched this woman named Asruun speaking to a crowd in a language that felt older than the country she was standing in. French. Of course they were French. The northern spirit has never been particularly interested in national borders. I told the promoter I’d cover the show and that I’d interview them in French if they’d have me. The whole night already felt charged, like the air before a summer storm that knows exactly where it’s going to land.

The venue was still holding the last heat of the day when I walked in. Outside the air had finally cooled, but inside it was thick and close. I passed the merch table and felt that familiar small grief of not being made of money. Beautiful death-metal fonts on the vinyl, black shirts that looked like they could stop a blade, CDs that promised rituals. The crowd was already half-transformed. Leather strip skirts. Braided beards thick enough to hide small animals. Face paint that looked like it had been applied with fingers instead of brushes. Bones hanging from belts. These people hadn’t come to watch. They had come to participate.

FRAYLE

The stage was dressed in low chandelier light, the kind that makes everything look like it’s happening underwater. A guitarist appeared in a heavy hood that erased his face. A drummer took position. A woman on bass with her face painted the color of wet ash. And the singer, veiled like a Nordic witch, wearing a crown that glowed with its own private electricity. I knew before the first note that this was not going to be polite.

They opened with a minor-key assault that would have made Megadeth check their watches. The bass and guitar hit like fists through drywall. The singer’s voice cut through it clean and sharp, no theatrical growling, no cheap theatrics. Just pure, controlled darkness. One minute and thirty-five seconds into the first song I already belonged to them.

They moved through their set like people who understood the assignment. “Treacle & Revenge” arrived as a dark Disney nursery rhyme that had gone feral in the woods and come back with blood on its teeth. Then “Summertime Sadness,” delivered with the slow, dangerous flirtation of someone who knows exactly how much damage they can do with a smile. The whole set was short, but it never once diluted itself. No compromise. No drift into the tired theatrics that have infected so much dark metal these last years. Just pure delivery of pain and beauty in equal measure.

Afterward I found the bassist at the merch table. Scottish, living in Cleveland because that’s where the band lives. I told her I was sorry about Cleveland and that we were kindred in the old blood. She laughed like someone who has heard that joke before and still finds it true. I told the singer they were the best dark metal band out of Cleveland, better than Nine Inch Nails, better than Slipknot, and I meant every word. She took the compliment the way people take a blade when they know it’s not pointed at them.

EIHWAR

Then the lights died.

When they came back up, the stage belonged to something older. Marc stood there in a helmet that completely erased his face, a silhouette carved out of shadow and iron. Asruun wore a wolf skull over her head like a crown that still remembered the kill. The parts of her face not covered by bone were painted into something beautiful and dangerous at the same time. Animal bones hung from her belt and clicked softly against each other every time she moved. The air in the room changed. You could feel the temperature drop half a degree just from the silence they carried with them.

They opened with “Heill Óðinn.” Marc began a low, ritual chant that sounded like it had been dragged up from the bottom of a well. Asruun answered with her drum and her voice, and every person in the room who had brought their own skin drum answered with them. The sound was immediate and physical. It wasn’t music anymore. It was a summons. The room filled with the sound of hands striking hide, and for a moment it felt like the walls themselves were trying to answer.

Then “Skjaldmö.” Marc barked the words in that old, bursty style that sits halfway between speech and animal. Asruun’s voice rode over it like smoke over fire. The crowd’s drums never stopped. People were already moving, not dancing so much as being moved. The energy was primeval, barely human, the kind of urge that lives in the spine and doesn’t care what your conscious mind thinks about it.

While Asruun was dancing and beating her drum, and singing in an angelic tone, the kind you think you would hear in battle as the angles arrive to take you into whatever afterlife you believe in, Marc lead a drum circle from the stage, beating his skins and leading us all in chants “WHOOO!!! HAAAAAAA” as if he was the taskmaster keeping sync and we were all the warriors rowing the tribe ships across the cold waters. Yeah, it felt just like that, not cosplay, we were really doing all of this together.

Somewhere in the middle of “Viking War Trance” I realized I could hear the bones on Asruun’s belt striking each other in time with the music. That small, dry clicking became part of the rhythm. Her voice stayed impossibly clear through all of it, calm and terrifying in the same breath, carrying the old northern songs into a room full of modern bodies that had temporarily forgotten what century they belonged to.

When “Ragnarök” hit, the entire room locked into the same pulse. I watched a woman named Emily, dressed almost identically to Asruun, lead a chaotic pagan dance circle in the middle of the floor. It looked completely unplanned and completely inevitable. Asruun herself was moving with a pair of swords, the blades catching the low light as she turned. Emily later told me she was part of a local pagan dance troupe. That explained the circle. It didn’t explain how natural it felt, like the room had been waiting for exactly this shape of movement.

They barely paused for breath. Marc shouted “Hugrheim!” and the drums dropped low enough for Asruun’s voice to take the whole space. There was something almost joyful in the way she sang it, pure expression without apology. In the spaces between the words I only half-understood, the room felt like it had slipped sideways into some older ritual. We weren’t an audience anymore. We were the congregation.

“The Forge” arrived with an electronic pulse underneath the ancient chanting. Marc had found that deep throat technique the Tibetan monks use, and he used it like a weapon. The combination of electronic groove, bone drums, and that low, vibrating chant made the entire room feel like a single organism sweating around a fire that existed only in the collective nervous system. When the song ended, people looked at each other like they had just survived something together.

By the time they reached “Ljósgarðr” the lyrics had become secondary. I stopped trying to track the language. It didn’t matter. The meaning was already in the body.

Before the last song Asruun spoke to the crowd. The drum she had been playing would be for sale. She had a short interview right after the set and then she would come to the merch table. Then they closed with “Berserkr,” the song about men who put on the skin and skull of the bear, took the old hallucinogens, and stepped into a state where the animal and the human stopped being separate things. The term “berserk” comes from exactly that practice. True story. The room knew it. You could feel it in the way people moved.

After the final note I walked with them toward the green room, speaking French, joking with Marc and the manager. I may or may not have seen Marc’s face without the helmet. Some mysteries are better left intact. We did a short interview in French (the subtitled version is linked elsewhere). I got the poster signed. The whole exchange felt like the natural aftermath of the ritual rather than a separate professional obligation.

My brother and a handful of friends who chase this kind of music have always said the best of these shows feel like church. Not the polite, Sunday version. The older kind. The kind where the gods are not metaphors and the body is the only altar that matters. Tonight was one of those nights. If Eihwar comes through your city, go. If you can find leather and braids and face paint, wear them. The music will meet you halfway, but it meets you harder if you arrive already half-transformed.

Some experiences don’t ask to be reviewed. They ask to be survived and then reported from the other side with the bruises still visible. This was one of them.

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CONCERT REVIEW

ARTIST: Squeeze

Date: 9 September 2026

Supporting Act: ADAM ANT

VENUE: Capitol Theater

CITY: Sale Lake City, UT

Sitting in the backseat of my brother’s Camaro on the long, sun-bleached ride home from a river trip, I got my first real dose of Adam Ant. Until that afternoon he had been nothing more than the sharp-dressed oddball in the Honda Scooters commercial with Grace Jones—cool, sure, but distant. Then Strip started pouring out of the speakers. An eleven-year-old kid is not usually handed an album that opens with the cheerful observation that people get naked and then asks what comes next, but the rest of the record was pure voltage. “Puss ’N’ Boots” especially hit like a secret transmission: clever, sneering, melodic, and cooler than anything else in my small suburban world. The lyrics were sharp, the grooves were sly, and the whole thing felt like it belonged to a more dangerous, more stylish planet than the one I lived on.

A few months later, ritual Saturday evening in front of WDCA 20, Solid Gold came on and Stevie Wonder introduced Adam Ant doing “Vive Le Rock.” Marco Pirroni and the band built a guitar archway right there on the television stage. Adam strode through it like he owned the decade, launched into the song, and moved in ways that had nothing to do with Michael Jackson. The theatrics were ridiculous and perfect. Years later I learned that Jackson had lifted the French field-commander jacket image from Adam. That still feels like one of the purest proofs of how far ahead Ant was running in those early years—cool enough that the biggest star on the planet borrowed the look and somehow made it less interesting.

I met him properly in 1990 at a record-store signing appearance. I was sixteen, vibrating with nerves, and handed him my copy of Manners & Physique. He signed it. That small square of cardboard still lives in the collection like a relic. I saw him once more in the late ’90s. The performance was as unhinged as the old videos had promised, even if the stage clothes had calmed down from the full historical-pirate-Napoleonic fever dream of the early days. The songs still carried the same charge. I left that night thinking the catalog was immortal and the man delivering it still had the necessary spark.

Squeeze was a longer, more complicated courtship. In 1988 I almost bought a ticket when 10,000 Maniacs were listed as openers. I went down to the box office and found a notice that the Maniacs had canceled for the Salt Lake date because they were doing Saturday Night Live that week. I decided one band wasn’t worth the money and walked away. Two years later Squeeze came through again and absolutely demolished the room. I stood there realizing I had made a genuine mistake in 1988. After that night I understood exactly what they were capable of when everything locked in.

So when the announcement came that Adam Ant would be opening for Squeeze (with Haircut 100 also on the bill), it felt like a pure 1980s transmission aimed directly at people like me. I had seen Nick Heyward a couple of years earlier and knew he was still more than capable of stealing a night if given the chance. Then the day-of email arrived: Haircut 100 were out. Something about altitude sickness. In their place, Leon Tilbrook—Glenn’s son—would open the show. I was told he was a serious musician in his own right. That remained to be seen.

Leon walked out into the early evening light and for the first couple of minutes we could only hear him from the pit; the PA was still asleep. He stood there good-naturedly while the crew scrambled, then leaned into the mic and said he hadn’t been booked for stand-up and didn’t have that much material ready. Once the guitar was finally live he tore into his own songs with real enthusiasm. One of them, he explained, he had written at eleven years old about being in love with a girl at school and the quiet sadness of it never happening. His father had liked the music so much that he took the tune, wrote new lyrics, and put it on one of his solo records. Leon told the story with a mixture of pride and mild familial betrayal that made the whole room laugh. He danced all over the frets, clearly enjoying himself, and made every unfamiliar song sound worth hearing. He closed the set by saying, “This is one you might know,” and picked out the opening guitar line of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” The entire venue recognized it within three notes and sang the rest with him. It was a perfect, generous hand-off. He would be back later in the evening with the family business.

Five minutes after Leon left the stage, two drummers appeared and sat down behind kits that were already miked and ready. One bass drum face read ADAM. The other read ANT. They started playing in tight unison. Adam Ant has always understood the power of two drummers when the material calls for it. One of the drummers was dressed in a full Versailles ballgown with Marie Antoinette hair; the other looked like he had simply shown up to work. They opened with “Dog Eat Dog” from Kings of the Wild Frontier, going all the way back to the beginning, and for a moment the years collapsed. The song still sounded feral. Then you started noticing the physical reality of the night.

Adam looked stiff. He was already winded after the first song. Salt Lake’s altitude is unforgiving if your body hasn’t adjusted, and it was clear he was fighting it. He thanked the crowd, then barked “Bang bang, you’re dead!” and the room answered without any prompting: “Did not! Did too!” They launched into “Vive Le Rock” and most of us had been waiting for that moment for years. The old dance moves were attempted more than they were executed. The body that once snapped through those angular, theatrical gestures was now negotiating with gravity and thin air. When I arrived at the venue the photo rules had been made very clear: no photographs of Adam Ant. I respected it. His manager apparently did not believe anyone would. He came at me hard during the set, repeatedly accusing me of shooting, demanding my name and credentials even after I told him multiple times I had not taken a single frame. By the fifth confrontation I told him he was simply being an asshole harassing a punter and asked him to go away. He reminded me one last time about the policy and finally left. The whole ugly little episode put a dent in the rest of the performance that never quite smoothed out.

Adam’s wardrobe was pure historical collage: straw gaucho hat, black bandanna, the old Civil War-style cross-belt jacket, a wide pirate leather belt with another Ant scarf tied to it, leather pants, and the signature knee-high boots. Half privateer, half Napoleonic ghost. It still looked right even if the man inside it was working harder than the clothes suggested. “Prince Charming” got people on their feet and dancing in place. “Desperate But Not Serious” still functioned because the audience knew every pause and filled them instinctively. But the voice was in trouble. It was frequently off-key. It was often buried in the mix. It was obvious he was fighting the monitors for most of the night. “Goody Two Shoes” and “Stand and Deliver” landed softer than they should have. The songs themselves remain bulletproof. The live instrument delivering them has simply changed. When the guitarist and bassist moved back to the drum risers and joined the two kits for “Kings of the Wild Frontier,” the sound became massive again and the song felt as timeless as it ever did. That moment worked. Large stretches of the set did not. I have loved Adam Ant’s music for decades. The records still hit. Seeing them delivered live in 2026 was a reminder that time is undefeated. You can honor the work completely and still admit that the voice could no longer keep up with the material for a full set. The charisma flickered. The catalog carried what it could. The night made the limitation impossible to ignore.

Ten minutes after Adam left the stage the drum risers were rolled off with impressive efficiency. A long platform was pushed into place carrying keyboards, guitar stands, a mandolin, a drum kit, and a series of small bar lamps glowing on velvet cloths beside each musician’s drink of choice. Squeeze walked out nine strong. They looked like the best house band the 1960s never quite managed to assemble—sharp zoot-suit variations, shiny threads, open-collar white shirts. Owen on bass wore baby blue. Danica Dora wore a tie. Everyone else looked like they had stepped out of a very stylish late-night residency. Glenn Tilbrook stepped to the microphone, said “Hello Salt Lake City,” and the band detonated “Pulling Mussels (From the Shell).” The sound was immediate, balanced, and locked. They played like people who had been living inside these songs for most of their lives and still found new corners to explore.

They took us through “Up the Junction,” “Another Nail in My Heart,” and “Is That Love” with the kind of precision that only comes from decades of muscle memory and genuine affection for the material. These songs are now forty-six years old. They do not sound like museum pieces. They sound like they are still being written in real time by people who understand exactly where the hooks live. Then the neon sign above the stage lit up with the word Trixies and they played the entire album front to back. If you have not spent time with that record, fix it. It is classic Squeeze DNA—irresistible melodies, sharp writing, rhythmic slyness—proving that the core ideas never needed Jools Holland or Paul Carrack to remain potent. Midway through one of the tracks Leon wandered over to his father’s pedalboard and began stomping on effects changes while both of them laughed. With nine people locked in that tightly there is room for joyful sabotage. The song never lost its footing. It simply grew a new texture for a few bars and then settled back into the pocket.

When I was shooting from stage right, Chris Difford, seventy-one years old, leaned forward with a full rock-star grin and gave me the look. Age is clearly just a number when the songs still fit and the band still means it. They finished the Trixies run with both parts of the title track, took a short breath, and Glenn announced they would play “some from the old catalog.” Instead of the saxophone that usually opens “Hourglass,” Chris played the line on guitar and the room dropped straight back into Babylon and On territory. That song owned Utah new-wave radio for a reason. The video still looks like it was directed by a caffeinated Salvador Dalí, and the chorus remains a loyalty test. If you never shouted along to it, you were never fully converted.

“Black Coffee in Bed” was enormous. After twenty-five-plus musicians have passed through the band over the decades, the current lineup still nailed every turn and every harmonic shift. “Cool for Cats” had Chris Difford on lead vocals; his voice has always sat in the same neighborhood as Carl Marsh from Shriekback, and tonight the resemblance felt especially strong. The whole venue moved with him. Glenn took “Tempted” and sang it with the authority of someone who has lived alongside that song long enough to make it his own even though it will forever be associated with Paul Carrack. Just when it seemed the set might be winding down they launched “Take Me I’m Yours” and turned it into a fifteen-minute celebration. Glenn introduced every member of the band while the music kept rolling. Each player took a solo. Owen grabbed an accordion and charged around the stage dancing from the ankles. When they got to Danica she delivered a sharp, sincere “Coat of Many Colors” that the room answered with real volume. I hope she heard how much it landed. The whole extended version felt loose and precise at the same time—the sound of a band that trusts itself completely. They hit the final downbeat one minute past Salt Lake’s weeknight curfew. That explained the near-absence of space between songs all night. They had twenty-one songs to deliver and no intention of leaving any of them behind.

Squeeze did not simply play Salt Lake City that night. They reminded everyone in the building why these songs lasted, why the writing still feels elastic, and how much pure fun remains available when the right people are driving the machine. The contrast with the earlier set was impossible to miss. One artist was fighting the limitations of time and altitude and monitors. The other was still discovering how much life the old material contained. Both catalogs deserve respect. Only one of them felt fully alive in the room.

If Squeeze roll through your town, put on the thin tie and the white socks and go. Dance like you know you shouldn’t. You will carry the night around with you for a long time afterward. Some performances settle into the memory as pleasant. This one settled in as necessary.

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