Notes from Freak Valley 2024: Day 2

Including Foster himself, Alex Henry Foster played as a full six-piece band, The Long Shadows, featuring one drummer and a second kit, a keyboardist/saxophonist/laptopist/vocalist, two guitars in addition to Foster’s own, and a lone bassist. Clearly the former Your Favorite Enemies frontman puts texture into consideration in his work. After the first song, which featured the first bowed guitar of the weekend, Foster explained that he was supposed to play last year but had a medical crisis, then talked about being nervous and the community of the festival making him feel at home, and so on, and was very much the bandleader with a music stand, a shaker and other elements coming and going, keyed for resonance. A depth of arrangement was fair enough for material with such breadth, and the heavy-adjacent-but-not-beholden-to-genre post-emo progressivism was fluid in its reach and various builds, had a density of vibe […] I went in back and sat for a bit, watched the campers coming and going, and that was fine. Fine. I went back out toward the end of the set and it had picked up, and Foster seemed like he meant every thank you he said.