REVIEW
REVIEW
☆ BY NICO CHODOR ☆
MARY IN THE JUNKYARD BROUGHT A SOOTHING, ALBEIT EERIE—folkloric change of seasons to a sold-out Rickshaw Stop on Wednesday evening in San Francisco. There was ambient music playing alongside the venue’s spinning disco ball when I first walked into the fray: someone crocheting in the back of the room, Rilo Kiley written on one person’s sweater, and Westside Cowboy printed on another, as well as Valkyries merch sprinkled into the mix. This was a stark but welcome break from the hardcore energy of the rock show I last attended here, and the South London trio impressed with a 16-song setlist spanning their debut album Role Model Hermit, a love letter to their hometown, and their 2024 diss track about California for night two of their trek through the states.
Lefty Parker joins their U.S. tour this November, raising the curtain with just his balaclava, guitar and song lineup written onto a napkin. His voice can be likened to Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes, emotionally wrought with a twang. Parker was bathed in snow-white lighting—at one point strumming with a paintbrush—and later joined by Clari Freeman-Taylor, Saya Barbaglia, and David Addison of mary in the junkyard for his closing number.
Freeman-Taylor possessed the crowd with a whispering soprano and command of her guitar. She dawned a white fur vest that made her look like some kind of huntress, with a soft orange flower pinned into her pixie cut. Her vocal harmonies with Barbaglia (bass and viola) make you feel shipwrecked, and the multi-faceted nature of Barbaglia’s performance, as she oscillated between strings and bass, was astounding. Addison (drums) weaves the haunting, ritualistic feel at Role Model Hermit’s center together with absolute self-assurance, most impressively on “New Muscles.”
They opened with the first four songs on the album, employing candlelit incantation on “Mantra III,” the well-respected art-rock riff on “Blood,” and play-fighting between Freeman-Taylor and Barbaglia during “New Muscles.” There is manic, almost primal strength in the lyrics of “New Muscles,” as Freeman-Taylor embraces thunder and lightning to make this track impossible to forget. “I’m a creature of only instinct,” she trills: a creature with new muscles all over who could take you down with one finger.
They performed “Bear Hunt” (unreleased), and vocals growled for this song’s final line: “when I look into your eyes, I feel crazy.” Freeman-Taylor went on to commend the SF transit system, and Barbaglia commented on the “big” drive from LA to the Bay, with displeasure. Longtime fans were howling for joy as the band moved through “ghost,” released in 2024 as part of their EP this old house. The girl to my right was particularly thrilled by this one, locking eyes with Clari for different sections of the chorus, and dancing in seventh heaven.
I was moved by “Jane,” which came out just two months ago, for the way it captures self-isolation at its most forlorn. “My mouth is full of stalactites,” in verse one, is woefully poetic, and by verse three, Freeman-Taylor gets even more existential with lines about how hard it is to be a woman, and how knowing yourself when everything is new seems too daunting a task. Barbaglia echoed this vocal sentiment with her viola, seemingly lamenting the changing sense of self that comes with age.
There was headbanging, and a delighted scream from the same girl next to me, for the live performance of “marble arch.” She had messaged the band on Instagram, begging them to play this one. Written beneath the actual Marble Arch in London, this song whispers and wails about the sting of physical distance between siblings when one moves away. I love how dynamically all-consuming this song feels, especially live.
Barbaglia fingerplucked her viola as the backbone of “Thou Shalt Sprout,” a spectral, lilting folk tale about a father sacrificing his body to sustain the rest of his family. Standout track “Crash Landing” was bewitching; it builds slowly through atmospheric drone sounds that beg you to let the sea swallow you, as does “Mouse,” which tells the story of Freeman-Taylor’s past life as a fisherman, with a mouse in her pocket, and how she’d reconnect with the human version of this mouse in the present. Mary in the Junkyard embraces the strange on their debut album Role Model Hermit, where past lives meet present, and reflection breeds premonition.
Lefty got back on stage with the band for their encore, and San Francisco rejoiced in the surreal feeling of “drains” played live at Rickshaw Stop. mary in the junkyard continue their first-ever North American headline tour through November, and the medieval tapestry of Role Model Hermit is out now.
