Citizen, SWG3 TV Studio, Glasgow, Tuesday 27 October

10/10

There are bands you outgrow and bands you simply stop putting on, and it usually takes a gig announcement to find out which is which. I hadn’t played Citizen in years when I saw the Ohio band were coming to Glasgow on the Halcyon Blues World Tour to promote their new album, and I bought tickets on faith, trusting that the records which got me through my younger years still had something left to say.
That faith was richly rewarded.

Opening with “Good Fortune”, Citizen ripped from the moment they took to the stage. It rattled the space - with guitars blurring into a wall of fuzz and drums driving everything forward. Over the top, Mat Kerekes’ vocals cut through, agonisingly crisp, as if he needed to pour every word out right then and there. A band seventeen years into their career could have started with the songs everyone knew. They chose the record they’d put out less than three months earlier, and it was the right call.

A good share of the set came from Halcyon Blues, and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. “Highs and Lows” grows from a pulsing bass line into an enormous chorus and sounded built for a space like this, while “I Can See You From Here”, “Is It In My Brain” and “Always the Last One to Leave” all stood up as well as anything older around them. The title track was the best of the lot. “Halcyon Blues” sounded like an instant classic, a song that already seems to have been in the set for years even though the album only came out in August.

Tracks from 2013’s Youth were the real test of whether the years away had dulled anything for me. They hadn’t. “The Summer”, “Sleep”, “Roam the Room”, “Figure You Out”, even “Sick and Impatient” (a welcome surprise) met the kind of response reserved for songs people have lived with for years, and it was obvious how much that record still means to everyone in the room (me included). Youth is a record about being young and not quite fitting in anywhere. Hearing it again as an adult was strange and comforting all at once – kind of like running into the person I used to be and wishing we’d kept in touch.

Out of everything they played, “How Does It Feel?” hit me the hardest. It sits at the slow, hazy end of Youth, a mid-tempo wall of sound with a shoegaze lean, and I shut my eyes and let it wash over me. With the song moving through the room and the rest of it blocked out, the years in between seemed to shrink to almost nothing, and it felt for a few minutes like the two of us were back in the same place. And I was in no hurry to open my eyes and let the present back in.

The rest of the night was the opposite of still. The energy was relentless, from the stage and from the floor alike, and the crowd surfing barely stopped. By the end, the people at the front were drenched, and every one of them was grinning like a loon.

From the outside, this kind of music is easy to mistake for anger, all distorted guitars and voices pushed to breaking point, and a room of people being passed over each other’s heads can look like a fight waiting to happen. Inside the room it feels like the opposite. Bands like Citizen say the things a lot of us struggle to say out loud, and when a room sings them back together, the weight of those words gets shared out and lightened. The soaked, smiling faces by the end of the night were all the proof I needed.

They closed with “The Night I Drove Alone”, their biggest hit, and it was the only way the night could have ended. Coming from Youth, it felt like a last nod to the album that so many of us hold dear, and the crowd sent it off with whatever they had left.

Citizen shaped a good part of my younger years, and I’d let them slip away without noticing. It turns out they were only ever a band I’d stopped putting on. Tuesday night put that right, and I’ve had them on at work all day today. They’re firmly back in rotation, and I can’t see them leaving it again.
10/10.

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