Hannah Bon
Audio By Carbonatix
Sabrina Teitelbaum made the wait worth it.
The 28-year-old singer-songwriter, who performs under the moniker Blondshell, had originally been due in Deep Ellum over two years ago — July 2023 at Club Dada — for her debut headlining appearance. Illness waylaid Teitelbaum and forced a cancellation. (She did return to Dallas later that year, albeit in an opening capacity for Liz Phair.)
Saturday’s appearance at The Studio at the Factory — a half mile from her scrapped ’23 gig — was, then, something of a release of long-held anticipation, as Blondshell at last made her debut as a headliner in Dallas.
Teitelbaum is backed by an airtight quartet of musicians on stage (guitarists Kerri Stewart and Ray Libby, drummer Anna Crane and bassist Maia Nelson) who turned the 70-minute set into an extended evocation of mid-1990s mood, as Teitelbaum’s pointed, personal lyrics were deftly woven into chunky guitars, melancholy melodies and propulsive rhythms. The stage, sparely dressed with no more than a backdrop bearing Blondshell’s name, gave the well-built songs nowhere to hide.
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Blondshell is touring behind its sophomore album, If You Asked for a Picture, which dropped in May. (The record’s title is amusingly twisted into the title for the current run of dates: “If You Asked for a Tour.”) The dozen songs — most of which were showcased Saturday — are a confident expansion of Teitelbaum’s sharply observed, self-titled debut.
“How’s it going out there?” Teitelbaum asked, which elicited enthusiastic whoops from the comfortably full room, which was enraptured throughout, singing along and hoisting phones aloft to capture every moment. “We’re going to play you a song about tits and ass — sorry to my little cousins who heard that.”
The droll intro to “T&A” masked its piercing sentiments: “Letting him in / Why don’t the good ones love me?” Teitelbaum intoned, her alto voice slicing through the churning guitars and rhythm section — and, it should be noted, Teitelbaum’s voice was often underpinned by Nelson’s gorgeous harmonies, creating a spookily beautiful echo.
Again and again, the hypnotic, mid-tempo songs would burst into glorious arias of disgust (“I wanna save myself, you’re part of my addiction / I just keep you in the kitchen while I burn,” Teitelbaum moans during “Olympus”) or spiral into anguished introspection: “Something’s always wrong / But I know there’s nothing less perfect to a girl than a mom,” a particularly lacerating line from “What’s Fair,” a stand-out track from Picture.
Teitelbaum largely stayed stationary, letting the music swirl around her, but would occasionally traverse the cozy stage, crouch near its lip, exhorting the gathered to sing louder or dance alone, lost in a reverie in front of the drum kit.
Blondshell is part of a class of next-generation musicians (such as Soccer Mommy, Bully, Gigi Perez and Clairo) finding fresh inspiration in the 120 Minutes era. Rather than trafficking purely in nostalgia, there is catharsis in dusting off flannel-draped feedback and sludgy, arresting riffs. (That throwback sensibility even extends to the merch: One shirt on sale Saturday bore the slogan “This is your brain … on Blondshell.”)
Indeed, we were reminded of something Teitelbaum told us two years ago, ahead of the planned late summer date. It underscored how, despite the passage of years, some things simply never change.
“I think the stuff I was trying to think about [for my record] was stuff that maybe I have felt I don’t hear people talk about enough. And maybe, I’m like, ‘I’m the only person in the world who feels this, this much about this one thing.’ So hopefully, when people listen to it, if they feel that way, they’ll feel less alone in that.”
