Gone can mean a lot of things, but not “sold out”. No, when a show is sold out, it’s sold out, and Greg Freeman sold out Schubas Saturday night for his performance as part of the month-long Tomorrow Never Knows multi-venue, winter music festival. Greg Freeman is a songwriter from Burlington, Vermont, who is having a bit of a moment right now. I don’t recall the buzz around him when his debut album, I Looked Out, came out in 2022, but after touring his newly released second album, Burnover, with MJ Lenderman this past year, his flowers are starting to get delivered one by one and at a very brisk pace.
In 2022, I would have categorized Greg Freeman as alt-country, even though he’s really only using that genre as a launching pad for other sounds, textures, and ideas not normally associated with alt-country. However, with his newest album, I find myself a bit more confused on how to categorize Greg, and even more confused on why I feel the need. It seems self-evident when listening to Burnover that Greg himself does not wish to be boxed into any one genre, any one sound, nor any one idea. He knows the community he’s in, he knows the sound of the music he writes, and he knows what kind of fans come to his shows. He knows he writes twangy indie rock, but I’m sure, eventually, all the Jason Molina, Doug Martsch, and Neil Young comparisons get a little tiring, so he went out and did something about it.
Now, I’m sure the sound for Burnover came together much more naturally than what I’m implying, but after really digging into this album the past month, I’ve been so impressed by how he managed to write an album that is very much not alt-country but still somehow stays well within its sphere. Each song has the illusion of twang, and you can sorta hear pedal steel or some harmonica here and there, but for the most part, Greg Freeman sounds very different than his 2022 self on Burnover, and it’s refreshing and inspiring to see. I know the album has generally received warm reception, if not outright critical acclaim, but I still see quite a few negative opinions online about his newish direction, and I get it, since his two albums, while similar in many regards, could not be more different from the outside looking in. However, I think all the ideas on Burnover come together beautifully and work together to create an outstanding sophomore effort that I was overjoyed to see live, especially in such an intimate and soulful venue like Schubas. Currently on tour with Ohio noise rockers Golomb, Greg was also fortunate enough to get Chicago indie royalty Minor Moon to open his sold-out Tomorrow Never Knows show. It was a lineup for the ages and a momentous start to my Chicago concert calendar (technically not a true start, as I saw Hannah Frey at the Empty Bottle earlier this month, but still) for the year.
The day I tire of Minor Moon is the day you take me out back. They were the first Chicago band I found on my own when I moved to Chicago five years ago, the first local show I saw when I caught them at The Hideout, and Sam Cantor, the man behind the Moon, was the first local musician to champion my reviews on Third Coast, so I really mean it when I say that Minor Moon is Chicago and Chicago is Minor Moon to me. They are such a special band, and this was a very special and intimate duo performance Saturday night with Sam and Chet Zenor, of Lucky Cloud, on lead guitar.
Now coming up on two years of The Light Up Waltz, Minor Moon’s intoxicating fourth album, their set Saturday night consisted of 6 songs off The Light Up Waltz and one song off Tethers, the album that came right before and the one that hooked me into the whole Minor Moon sphere of influence. When watching a Minor Moon performance, every song is impeccable, but for this performance in particular, I had the most fun with the one-two punch of “Blue Timing” into “I Could See It Coming” off The Light Up Waltz, “No Lightning Fix” as one of the quintessential cuts off Tethers with V.V. Lightbody on flute, and the title track off The Light Up Waltz that Sam and Chet ended their performance with. As much as I love the soft and subtle elegance of the Tethers closer, “In The Long Year”, “The Light Up Waltz”, a similarly structured, albeit much warmer and more tender song that I for some reason always compare to “In The Long Year”, made for a very adequate and climactic finish that I will carry with me until the next time I get to see Minor Moon in and around town. I was also blessed enough to grab the setlist and a bottle of Minor Moon’s own locally produced and bottled “Lightning Fix” hot sauce to make the evening complete. As an aside, the hot sauce review is in, and it’s to die for. I am biased, I’ll never not be, but this hot sauce is seriously so flavorful while still having an edge to it, and that combination is hard to get just right in the hot sauce world.
Although I had found refuge last year in Ohio post-punk torch bearers Artificial Go’s 2025 release Musical Chairs, I completely and utterly missed out on Golomb, Columbus’s newest noisy indie rock outfit, who also released their second full-length album last year entitled The Beat Goes On. Drawing lovingly from indie noise icons like Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, and Dinosaur Jr., Golomb is a band rooted in the past but with one foot and two hands firmly placed in the future. I do hate jumping on the comparison train, but I do think it’s warranted for a band such as Golomb who wear their inspirations so lovingly on their sleeves, not as cheap references but as valiant badges of honor.
I found myself enjoying every single song they played Saturday night, which is a bit unusual for me with bands I had previously never heard of. They opened the show with “Be Here Now”, my favorite song off The Beat Goes On, after having listened to the album in full, and without a doubt, my favorite song from their performance. It’s so entrancing and hypnotic, not in a weird psychedelic way but more in that you are so utterly relaxed you can’t help but find yourself hypnotized in the Golomb gospel. Throughout their set, they played songs that, much like “Be Here Now”, featured incredible musical world-building through dynamics. So many of their songs just build and build, up to down, left to right, until you get to the end and realize your mouth is a little bit agape with amazement at what you were beheld.
Golomb, as a familial scrappy three-piece, is so much fun to watch that you find yourself a bit lost by the time they get to the end of each song because you just stopped keeping track of verses, choruses, bridges, and chaotic noise solos. At one point, lead singer and guitarist Mickey Shuman introduced the next song in a very quiet, modest tone by saying, “This is a love song”, promptly followed by the biggest and most destructive wall of sound your ears have ever heard since your last Swans show. That is the type of band Golomb is, and I believe the world will be theirs for the taking in just a few years.
Greg Freeman is such an interesting and amusing performer to see live. From the second he walked on stage to the moment he walked off following the encore, he had this powerful and commanding presence, like he had written the book on how to properly perform rock music live, but at the same time had this extreme sense of humility and humbleness that I haven’t seen in too many performers. He spoke rarely in between songs and was soft-spoken when he did. I was in the very front, and even I still struggled to hear him when he spoke because of how almost nervous and shy he appeared when talking to the crowd; it was a delightful juxtaposition to the pure, unbridled rage he brought to his songs.
I know saying the words “rage” and “Greg Freeman” in the same sentence aloud doesn’t translate that well because, after all, Greg doesn’t front an extreme metal band, he doesn’t write hardcore punk songs, he isn’t calling for a circle pit in the middle of “Gulch”, but he just gives off that energy when you watch him. What I noticed while being totally engrossed in his band’s performance was that he was never not in a power rock stance. He always had one foot planted firmly behind him with the other out front. Even though he isn’t fronting a punk band, alt-country is built on the foundations of punk, and his band is loud, so I noticed that for a good deal of each song, he was pretty much shouting his head off, with enlarging veins pulsating up and down in his neck.
Before the show, I also had no idea Greg was such an incredibly accomplished guitar player. He had brought along a bassist, a saxophonist, a drummer, and a pedal steel player to complete his ensemble, but he was the only guitar player in the band the entire night, and when you consider how weird and oddly technical a lot of his songs are for being in the alt-country sphere, he really earns your respect fast.
Greg Freeman played almost every song from his 2025 album Burnover, only skipping over the title track and the nearly nine-minute closer, “Wolf Pine”. The first time I listened to Burnover back in August of last year, I really didn’t like it; in fact, I don’t think I liked a single song from it except for “Rome, New York”, and I didn’t even like the song that much. It was quite a while until I came back to the album, but when I did, I immediately noticed how wrong I was in thinking that it was a total sophomore slump. I still think I’d take his first album over Burnover if this were a desert island situation, but Burnover is truly an incredible accomplishment. I was initially thrown off by how different it sounded, being much more of a jazzy, off-beat indie rock album versus a twangy, noisy alt-country one, but that just took time to get used to. Songs like “Point and Shoot”, “Gulch”, and “Gone (Can Mean a Lot of Things)” burn with a fire that only songs like “Colorado” off his last album aspired to, and they burn with an even brighter, punkier flame live. “Salesman” is as fun live as it is on record because who doesn’t think that main riff is funky as hell? “Rome, New York” and “Gallic Shrug” were two of the more twangier numbers off Burnover, and they absolutely killed live, the latter being my personal favorite song off the album.
Towards the middle of the set, Greg went off on an I Looked Out tangent with three songs in a row from the album. “Long Distance Runner” is as brooding a piece live as it is on record, but was somehow even slower live, and I do not say that as a negative. At moments, it felt like Greg and his band were playing the song slower than the time on a clock, and I was so surprised how they could even manage to keep in time with one another, given the fact that it appeared that Greg did not have in-ear monitors. He played one of his most beloved songs next, “Come and Change My Body”, which transitioned so beautifully and effortlessly into “Tower”, the most moody 90s-esque song he has on his debut. “Tower”, being the culmination of his run of three debut songs, ended in a crushing slab of drums and distortion so heavy that I was a bit unsure if the ceiling lights would behave themselves and stay upright.
“Curtain” was another fun one that, after the halfway point, diverged into a battle of solos as the pedal steel traded off with the soprano sax, all while Greg was head down and power-stanced strumming away all his worries. As if “Curtain” wasn’t fun enough, “Sawmill” followed in what may very well be my favorite performance of the whole night. Next to “Gallic Shrug”, “Sawmill” is my favorite song from Burnover, and it only just recently became one since it’s a song that doesn’t immediately hit you over the head with its brilliance. It is, without a doubt, the most understated and underrated song off Burnover and harkens back to the weird but melodic nature of songs like “Palms” off his debut. There wasn’t anything particularly special about this performance compared to any other song performed that night, but the song doesn’t need any wild fanfare because it speaks so loudly on its own with its raw sonic power and intimidating atmosphere.
Greg ended his pre-encore set with “Colorado”, probably the most aggressive and straight-up fun song off I Looked Out. It’s a rousing and rambunctious song, like early Built To Spill on steroids, and I had a great deal of fun staring at Greg’s neck in fascination as he shouted verse after verse, sweat dripping down his face and the veins in his neck doing the sort of happy dance neck veins do when their human is giving their absolute all.
After leaving “Colorado”, the band stepped outside for a quick cool down, only to come back in seconds later to play “Palms” as their one encore song. I was surprised to not hear “Right Before the Last Waves Took Vestris” since it is by and large his most popular song, but maybe he just needs a break from it. However, believe me when I say that I am not at all disappointed with getting “Palms” as an encore song. Greg Freeman is one of the most interesting artists not only in modern alt-country but in indie rock, period, and it’s because of songs like “Palms”, “Tower”, and “Long Distance Driver”. These are the types of songs that I’m not hearing from other artists in the same space, and I think it’s because most shy away from really pushing themselves to write something that’s a bit unexpected and uncomfortable. I’m not saying Greg is pulling these songs out of the thin air of his brilliance, as these aren’t the most unique songs ever composed, but it’s just the way he plays them that makes them so unique and inspiring. The textures, colors, and microscopic molecules found in “Palms” are so interesting and cathartic. I love a good harmonics-based riff; they often require little to no effort to sound good, yet I rarely hear them these days. They pack such an emotional cut punch with each reverberation that it’s hard to understand why they aren’t in each songwriter’s back pocket, but I’m just glad Greg Freeman understands the importance of them and how to properly use them to convey utter despair, melancholy, and tired hopelessness.
This show was such an awesome way of starting the year off on the right note. Greg Freeman, Golomb, and Minor Moon are all such inspired, humble, and gracious performers that make it downright impossible not to enjoy yourself to the maximum. I was expecting Greg to be great, but I wasn’t expecting him to be as great as he was, and that’s on me. Although Greg spoke softly, he carried a big stick by selling special tour posters and sending all profits to Minneapolis mutual aids to help wage the fight against ICE waging an unjust and mercilessly violent war against the people of Minnesota. All three of these bands are ones you need to hear and should support, so I implore you and your wallets to visit their Bandcamp pages and see them live the next chance you get! Disappointment will not be in your vocabulary by the end of the night, I promise you that.
All photos by Lorenzo Zenitsky.
Did you enjoy this post? Please consider supporting Third Coast Review’s arts and culture coverage by making a donation. Choose the amount that works best for you, and know how much we appreciate your support!
