Lizzy McAlpine
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★☆
Standard attire for a Lizzy McAlpine gig is a long, flowing white skirt and a hair bow – but on Halloween night in the 3Arena, her audience is awash with masks, wigs, horns and angel wings.
The Philadelphia singer-songwriter invites us into a Tiny Desk style livingroom. Warm lights, lounging performers and, for the most part, simple arrangements. She herself is cosplaying as Cruella de Vil, with her six-piece backing band making do as Dalmatians.
Dublin is the 23rd and final stop on McAlpine’s Older tour, six months on from its opening night. It has been a formative run of gigs. Last year, she was forced to reschedule, and in some cases cancel, the European dates on her first major tour to prioritise her physical and mental health.
Emerging to birdsong and the swell of mallets pounding drums, this feels like a better curated environment. As McAlpine dives into The Elevator, the sound pares back to piano and vocals – an abbreviation that runs through the set and, indeed, the album from which the tour takes its name.
US backer pledges to match donations to Irish Traditional Music Archive
From Christian Lee Hutson to Oisín Leech: The top five roots albums of 2024
Top five Irish jazz albums of 2024, from Mary Coughlan to Adjunct Ensemble
The music of 2024: Our critics’ verdicts on the best albums and acts of the year
The band slides into Come Down Soon, groovier and more layered, and then on to Movie Star, which retreats once more. For the most part, the night follows that pattern. McAlpine’s voice is velvety and enchanting – it holds a deliberate spotlight and the stripping back of the instrumentation, in some ways, is intended to add more substance.
Earlier this year, she reflected on the song that catapulted her to arenas like this one. Ceilings blew up on TikTok a year after the release of her second album, five seconds flat. It hadn’t even been a single on the record, but it dwarfs every other track in her discography for numbers on streaming sites.
At the start of the Older tour, with Ceilings sitting somewhere in the middle of the setlist, McAlpine had noticed fans walking out when she finished playing the song. Since its rise, she has had to deal with the billing of social media star, and the perks and pressures of a major label deal with RCA Records.
Paring back, then, is something of a response. It works beautifully on songs like March, a lament for McAlpine’s late father, and Older’s title track, which she describes as the “turning point in the record” after a period of feeling lost and confused about its direction.
Still, the show could benefit from some more of the theatrical. Doomsday, one from the last LP, is colourful and brilliantly morbid, set against a soaring instrumental and shuffling, hangman drums.
Some of the lyrical snippets on the new album still feel designed for TikTok, but for 90 minutes in the 3Arena, the costumed crowd are spellbound listening to every word McAlpine utters. She admits, somehow, to having only recently discovered Joni Mitchell, but makes up for it with a flawless cover of Big Yellow Taxi.
For the encore, the Dalmatians opt for a wardrobe change, reappearing in makeshift McAlpine skirts for the end of the road. They finish on Ceilings, and no one is in any hurry to leave. An enchanting, livingroom loungecore evening as the singer-songwriter looks to move on from viral success.
