(All photos by Nicole Berlin Photography)
The Mohawk was sold out on Thursday night, and Sabrina Teitelbaum felt every inch of it. Toward the end of her hour-plus performance, the alternative singer-songwriter known as Blondshell told an often-enraptured crowd that she had played Austin more than she’d played anywhere else — “north of 15 times,” she estimated — and said the multi-tiered throng now in front of her was “definitely” her largest crowd among those performances.
It certainly wasn’t hard to believe. The fanbase that the NYC-rooted, L.A.-living Teitelbaum has built for herself in the past few years is both increasingly large and increasingly devoted, and by the time she began on Thursday there weren’t any distinct pieces of Mohawk real estate to easily claim for yourself. Blondshell’s moody accounts of bad relationships, formative life experiences and figuring yourself out continue to resonate as she tours her second LP, If You Asked For a Picture, and during her best moments of Thursday night’s strong set, she had the jam-packed crowd inextricably in her clutches.
While Blondshell boasts plenty of alt-rock muscle and knows her way around dynamic contrast — her sound has more than a little grunge influence, in fact — it’s the accounts of life therein that make her a true phenomenon. Teitelbaum’s biting, vulnerable songwriting carries echoes of both Liz Phair’s profane frankness and Lucy Dacus’ literality. In the hands of someone as gifted as Teitelbaum, that approach leads to emotional high points live as fans — having heard at least some of their truth in her poetry — earnestly sing it back at her.
That’s what happened early on with “Sepsis,” an anthem off 2023’s Blondshell that’s both a skewering of a terrible boyfriend and of Teitelbaum’s narrator herself for not demanding better. (Opening lines: “I’m going back to him/My therapist is pissed/We both know he’s a dick/At least it’s the obvious kind.”) Hearing the near-operatic chorus — “It should take a whole lot less/To turn me off, to turn me off” — rope in audible participation from so much of the audience served notice of just how profound a personal connection Blondshell can forge with her fanbase. As a performer, she’s comfortable and confident, overly demonstrative only in her gesticulations; those hands and arms go anywhere and everywhere.
There’s more to Teitelbaum’s writing than just bad romance, though, and her newer songs dealing with faulty motherhood — set opener “23’s a Baby” and “What’s Fair” — providing high points as well. The latter, which takes frank stock of her mom’s own performance, hit with a sharpness and clarity that easily overrode my reservations about whether certain words like “assessment” belong in the chorus of a rock song.
After a bit of an energy dip sometime past halfway through — around the time of her abruptly ending cover of Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” — Blondshell and band brought it home with some of her most gold-star material. “He Wants Me,” probably one of the closest things to portraying full romantic contentment that you’ll find in Blondshell’s catalogue, served as something of a changeup to the tales of shithead men. At the other end of the spectrum, her usual closer, the superlative poisoning fantasy “Salad,” left the crowd with exactly the memory they should have of Blondshell: An incisive rock artist with well-articulated anger grounded in — and properly mitigated by — her insights and analytical clear-headedness. Many singer-songwriters today play in the same general space, but few are in Teitelbaum’s ballpark.
More photos of Blondshell and her opener, Minneapolis indie rockers She’s green:
Blondshell:
She’s green:
