Review: Lord Huron Performs Historical Fiction at a Sold-Out Red Rocks

Lord Huron, the dark-Americana outfit, aspires to be something greater than a band. "You can enjoy the music on your own if you want to, but I also wanted there to be more to dig into," singer/songwriter/guitarist Ben Schneider told the New York Times in 2014, a little over a year before Lord Huron released its album Strange Trails, which included the now-ubiquitous hit single "The Night We Met."

For the uninitiated, Lord Huron is buried in sometimes inscrutable lore: The songs it plays are credited to fictional characters in the band's imagined universe, fleshed out with music videos, films, websites and even a comic book, in the case of Strange Trails.

Lord Huron stans are a cult of their own, some writing lengthy Reddit treatises interpreting the albums. For those of us not immersed in Schneider's alternate construct of reality, some rudimentary background on Strange Trails, which the band played in full at Red Rocks Amphitheatre on May 28, helped a bit. But perhaps a read-through of the comic book beforehand would have added more.
It was slightly drizzling slightly when the band launched into "Love Like Ghosts," a track credited to Cambodian lounge singer Francine S. Lu, stage name Frankie Lou, a character in the Lord Huron universe who's also credited with writing "The Night We Met," which has more than three billion plays on Spotify. Other credited fictional artists and songwriters on the record include the Phantom Riders, Buck Vernon, Remy Fusil — it's easy to get lost in the Lord Huron world.

Schneider is a crooner in the lineage of Chris Isaak, trading guitar licks with guitarist Tom Renaud, complemented through the night with harmonica and piano. The members were dressed in Western finery, and stage props — like a broadcaster's desk and, during the encore, a pay phone — fleshed out Lord Huron's otherworldly intentions.
Schneider told the crowd he hadn't played some of the songs for ten years, which isn't surprising — one gets the feeling this is a band whose catalogue is largely deep cuts. As the drizzle increased to a downpour, with much of the sold-out crowd donning the $5 trash bag ponchos available at the bar, the crowd's enthusiasm was palpable.

As for Strange Trails played in its entirety: As a non-stan ignorant to much of the album's folklore, many of the tracks sounded in the same vein as "The Night We Met," whether Frankie Lou penned them or not. But there were moments of magic among the raindrops, like when bassist and keyboardist Miguel Briseño took to the theremin onstage, waving his hands in the air like a spiritualist to coax sounds from the instrument during "Way Out There." It was like an old-time tent revival — now if only there'd been some fucking tents to keep the crowd dry.

After concluding the album's hit closer, "The Night We Met," the band took a five minute break before returning for an eight-song encore, including just one song, "Nothing I Need," from Lord Huron's upcoming LP, The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1. The pouring rain sucked for fans, but it also added an appropriate level of gloom to largely impressionistic night. Lord Huron is certainly trying to evoke a previous era, just not a historical era — this was historical fiction wrought large and loud.

See more photos from the show below:
After two sold-out shows at Red Rocks, Lord Huron will headline the Outside Festival on Sunday, June 1.