Hobo Johnson, Dayglow: Eventim Olympia, Liverpool

Hobo Johnson

Hobo Johnson is welcomed to Enetim Olympia in emphatic style, Getintothis’ David Hughes was there to discover the Californian treasure.

Hobo Johnson, AKA FrankLopes Jr., is in many ways, an enigma.

It’s difficult to sum up his style of music, if you call it music.

He raps over the top of a variety of different sounds and genres of music. Is ‘rap’ the right word? It’s more like rather passionate spoken word, but whatever it is, when he arose from the back seat of his Toyota Corolla, he took the world by storm.

An NPR Tiny Desk session, performing hit top hit Peach Scone, blew up all over the internet, achieving millions of views in a few weeks, showing off his unique style.

Within a few weeks after this, his two-year-old album rose up the Billboard charts to reach #11, an impressive feat we’re sure you’ll agree.

His spoken word style is quite unique in the way he does it, like a kind of rapping, with some shouting and screaming thrown in for good measure, but the music he performs over is what helps him stand out.

Some of the songs sound like a standard indie guitar song, see Peach Scone, some have a jazzy element to them, like The Ending, and some have a strong American R&B style to them, like Romeo and Juliet. It’s a weird eclectic mix of music and style of singing (whatever we’re going to call it), but most impressive is Hobo’s lyricism.

His lyrics are sometimes like an internal monologue, sometimes telling a story, and sometimes, just absolutely weird, Subaru Crosstrek XV probably being the weirdest. An ode to the car in ways.

Hobo Johnson is weird and wonderful.

It’s not often you see queues wrapped round venues in Liverpool anymore, but this is certainly one of those nights. The queue is massive.

The room is pretty much full as soon as we walk in. Trying to get anywhere near the front is most definitely a challenge, one we avoid, but we see others try and fail.

Up first is Dayglow, a 5-piece indie pop band from Austin, Texas. They instantly command the room, stating “We hope you’re here to dance, because we don’t have any other plans.” And the crowd oblige.

Their style is an interesting blend between the ‘lazy Sunday afternoon’ indie pop and some kind of Tame Impala psych pop vibe. They certainly look like that stereotypical white boy guitar band, weird and wacky clothes and long hair dress each member of the band.

They groove their way through the set, providing most of the crowd a reason to move and boogie around, before they play their most loved song, Can I Call You Tonight? before we finally realise we’ve heard this band before in the depths of a Spotify playlist.

Their final two songs consist of a cover of Everybody Wants to Rule the World, followed by their most upbeat song of the night, Run the World!!! which sends the room into a frenzy.

They are certainly a band to watch in the future and hopefully they’re back in Liverpool sometime soon.

Tom Waits at 70 – I don’t wanna grow up

By now the room is crammed full, and finally the lights go down, Love Story, by Taylor Swift comes on and everyone starts singing before Hobo and his band bounce on stage. There’s an air of disappointment as the song stops, before Hobo introduces himself and starts the show.

His first few numbers have a hip hop vibe, with Hobo bouncing round the stage with such energy, performing crowd favourite, Romeo and Juliet. Following this song, he states how he’s not feeling too well and “needs some of that free healthcare”, which gets a laugh from some, but the majority of the room starts booing; the day we found out we’ve got another four years of the Tories was not the day to make that joke.

At this point, he could have very easily lost the crowd, but his charm and humour wins them all back, despite another point later in the show where they boo him again; this time a more playful booing.

His band are phenomenal. At times, he recites his lyrics with no music, in what seems a random timing, and then at a random trigger point, his band all come in at the same point, with no timing errors or problems.

The jazz, hip hop, indie, R&B vibe that each and every song has, are no match for this 7-piece band, who effortlessly blend between genres, at some points even feeling like a metal band.

As every song progressed, the crowd get louder and louder, jumping around and dancing to his songs more and more, which is impressive as it’s not necessarily the music you’d expect that. He performs his most loved hits, with Subaru Crosstrek XV thrown in there for good measure.

https://twitter.com/Joannemarshalll/status/1206358117623177217

Between songs, it can be quite difficult to differentiate as to whether he is just talking to the crowd or starting the next track, with what seems like some freestyle poetry to link songs between songs. It’s really clever and keeps us captivated and interested in what he says and doesn’t allow us to switch off at all.

Other noteworthy points of the show include the moment he made the crowd put their heads down and apologise to Justin Bieber, for how we all treated him when he became famous, the moment his band left stage and he announced he was going to play Wonderwall, before playing a stripped back version of one of his songs on his own with a guitar, and his final original song of the night, which we all related to, being I Want a Dog.

His final song of the night was a cover of September by Earth Wind and Fire, which he performed in his own unique way, but that still gave justice to the song.

There is so much more we could write about, but then this article would be ten pages long.

All you need to know is…
Hobo Johnson is weird and wonderful and definitely worth your time.

Images by Getintothis’ Warren Millar