Concert Reviews

Review & setlist: Zach Bryan can’t quite fill the space at Gillette

Unlike his opener, Jason Isbell, Bryan seemed to struggle with the scope of the venue — but he did have a few gems.

By Marc Hirsh

June 27, 2024

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Zach Bryan, with Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit, at Gillette Stadium, Foxborough, Wednesday, June 26

When is a country singer not a country singer? It’s a question worth asking about Zach Bryan, whose first few singles got more action on the rock charts than on the country charts and who has (as of now) claimed more rock number ones than country chart-toppers.

True, the Oklahoma-raised artist sings about his home state rather often (four of his songs explicitly name it in their titles) and his band includes a fiddle, a banjo and a pedal steel guitar. But at Wednesday’s sold-out Gillette Stadium concert (he returns on July 17), he sacrificed the rustic trappings of Nashville gold for rock impact. As a result, he served neither especially well, and whatever charm Bryan has that got him to stadium status was lost in the need to fill the space.

It didn’t help that Bryan and his band were mixed so oppressively, with the system cranked to a level that seemed indifferent to sound definition, that he was hard to understand whether he was singing or attempting to talk to the audience. The violin in “Open The Gate” came across more as a drone than as the second voice it wanted to be, and the eager electric churn at the start of “Oklahoma Smokeshow” hinted at a charge that never came. For a song about a girl that gets Bryan going, it looked for any opportunity to leak energy.

Bryan also pushed too hard himself, so jazzed at playing such a large stage — about the extent of the personality he showed — that he seemed to lose control of his voice. He yelped, he hollered and, in “Nine Ball,” “Dawns” and plenty of other songs, he forced a loud, contrived growl to convey excitement. At best, Bryan’s vocals were conversational and offhand, but that tipped over into tunelessness on his current hit “Pink Skies.”

But every now and then, it was possible to hear how Bryan’s act might work in a smaller venue. The cut-time clomper “God Speed” was an accepting prayer that would have shone in even a sizable club or theatre. “The Great American Bar Scene” had enough space inside it that the booming sound didn’t overwhelm it, the singer’s acoustic strums flitting in and out to serve as the song’s backbone. And limited to just acoustic guitar, banjo and supporting harmonies, “Smaller Acts” was quieter, smaller and better than most of the full-band numbers.

Bryan’s aim to fill the outsized stage also came out in how much he appealed to local interests. He sang about “The Great Massachusetts Bar Scene” instead of his new album’s more national perspective, and changed “From Austin” to “From Boston” after talking about how he threw up his pre-show burrito the last time he played around these parts. Even when he wasn’t rejiggering the choruses themselves, he shoved Boston into enough songs that by the time the city came up in “28,” it sounded like it was more glad-handing the crowd when he was actually just singing the lyrics as written.

It all added up to a concert that felt like Bryan trying anything and everything he could to match the scale of the venue and never quite pulling it off. When a downpour opened up in full as if on cue right when he announced “Wet, Hot, American Nights,” he and the band gamely pressed on as if invigorated by the rain à la Taylor Swift, but the weight of the weather slowed them down instead. When a fan made his way to the stage to sing the strummy stomp “Heading South,” Bryan performed it with him as uneventfully as if it were his own guitarist.

And when the encore came and the whole band crammed shirtless (except for Bryan, repping for the Celtics) onto a small satellite stage for the minor-key hootenanny of “Revival,” the tightness and constant motion fired things up for a short while. But then the song kept going for nearly 15 minutes, cycling through tick-ticking bass burbles and banjo and fiddle breakdowns before returning back to zero, over and over, Bryan and his boys pushing and pushing through the rain like an inefficient machine, putting more energy into it than they were capable of getting out of it.

The threat of the storm scuttled planned opener Levi Turner’s set, which meant that second-billed Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit ended up kicking things off instead. Another artist who could be plausibly claimed by both rock and country music, Isbell showcased everything the headliner didn’t have: a strong, distinct voice; well-rendered songs with enough musical character to stand up on their own; a clear and dynamic mix that allowed him and his band to shift up and down seemingly on a whim without losing an ounce of their power. The fired-up desperation of “King Of Oklahoma” and the grip-losing country rager “Super 8” were easy winners, but even the insistent, tiptoeing atmospherics of “Strawberry Woman” and the eager, vulnerable terror of “Cover Me Up” translated miraculously well to the stadium setting.

Setlist for Zach Bryan at Gillette Stadium, June 26, 2024:

• Overtime
• Open The Gate
• God Speed
• The Great American Bar Scene
• Fifth Of May
• From Austin
• Nine Ball
• East Side Of Sorrow
• Something In The Orange
• 28
• Tourniquet
• Condemned
• Oklahoma Smokeshow
• Dawns
• Billy Stay
• Pink Skies
• Smaller Acts
• Heavy Eyes
• Wet, Hot, American Nights
• Heading South
• I Remember Everything
• Hey Driver
• Burn, Burn, Burn
• Quittin’ Time

ENCORE:

• Revival

Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.