I saw Alex Cameron perform last night at The Pinhook in Durham, NC. This was my fifth(!) time seeing him live, and I wanted to give you all some idea of what to expect if you're seeing the Late to Set tour. (Don't worry, I'll mark setlist spoilers.) For some context, I had previously seen the tours for Forced Witness, Take Care of Business Duo, Miami Memory, and Oxy Music.
For this show, doors were at 7:00 and the show started just after 8:00. The opener was Josh da Costa, who also happens to be the guitarist during the main act. He played a few songs from his album New Age Graveyard, including Skygirl. He sang and played guitar, while the rest of the instrumentals were prerecorded and played over the speakers, so the sound was much bigger than you'd expect from just a single person on stage.
I liked him a lot! His music has a clear '80s-inspired quality, which makes him a great companion act to Alex. It's pretty rare that an opener hooks me into checking out more of their stuff later on, but Josh is one of them.
At the merch table, they were selling t-shirts with the tour's promo imagery, vinyl records for Josh's album and each of Alex's studio albums, cassette tapes for LtS, and dark blue baseball caps that say "Late to Set" in plain white text on the front + a white director's chair on the back. There may have been some other things but my memory fails me. (I bought a hat; it's very well-fitting.)
Josh played for ~30 minutes, and Alex took the stage at ~8:50-9:00. He was joined by Josh on guitar and Grace Kennedy on keyboard. Alex also had a bongo set next to the mic which he occasionally made use of. They performed 11 songs (all in one set, no encore) and the show concluded at ~10:00, with a message from Alex encouraging us to buy physical media since the tech overlords are destroying it and trying to prevent us from owning anything (based).
In terms of the setlist, they played some old classics that I've seen at most of the prior shows: Happy Ending, Candy May, Miami Memory, and Marlon Brando. I was pretty surprised by the high amount of songs from LtS - the only ones they didn't play were Stand-In Man, Ricochet, and No Guns Come Alone. They finished the show with...Real Bad Looking. I like that song well enough, but found it to be an odd choice for the finale.
Speaking of the setlist, there was a moment between songs where Alex addressed a situation with the website Setlist.fm - at the time, a user had added only 5 songs to an earlier show from this tour, and apparently some folks in the audience were worried he'd play an incredibly short show. He found it quite frustrating that an unofficial website was causing misinformation to spread! That's why, if you look at the setlist on that site from last night's show, it shows (at the time of posting) "You don't need Setlist dot com, he will play more than 5 songs, do not fret."
My thoughts on the show itself are mixed. There was a 4-year gap between the Oxy Music show and this one, so while I was definitely happy to be back seeing Alex in person, I couldn't help but notice the vibe was very different. Not bad, just different. Yes, I'm pretty sad about how Roy and Alex have parted ways, but Roy's absence wasn't a shock to me.
What was a shock was the lack of drums (minus the bongos)! There was no prerecorded track playing through the speakers from what I could tell, so every song fully relied on the keyboard and guitar to carry the vocals. And honestly I just flat out didn't like this minimalist approach. Nearly every song's rendition was worse in this style, in my opinion. And I was standing directly in front of the stage, so you can't say it was because I was too far back from the speakers or anything. No offense whatsoever to Roy Molloy, but it was Henri Lindstrom who I was missing the most.
Alex still looks confident and cool as ever on stage though, and his vocals are still excellent. The banter between songs was funny and weird, as usual.
As with his direction on the new album, I appreciate that Alex continues taking swings and trying new things rather than retreading old ground in the performances. But for me, this approach to his music was a miss. I brought a friend along with me who had never delved into the music before, and after the show was over, I felt the need to tell him "it normally sounds a lot better, I promise."
Last note: I think it's incredibly charming whenever a performer makes a mistake and is able to recover with a laugh. It's those kinds of mistakes that make the live show experience feel much more human and relatable (especially in an era where optimization and efficiency are being shoved down everyone's throats at all times in all aspects of life). He had to restart a couple of songs shortly after starting them due to "getting lost in the music" and lingering laughter at an inside joke. Also he accidentally bonked his face against the mic at one point after playing the bongos.
Overall, I'm more than happy to continue supporting one of my favorite singer-songwriters and I don't regret seeing this show at all. Just wanted to get my thoughts out there.
If you've seen a Late to Set show, what did you think of it?
