Hozier Gets a Hero’s Welcome That Isn’t ‘Too Sweet’ at All: Review

Hozier didn’t talk at great length more than a couple of times during the opening of his three-night stand at L.A.’s Kia Forum this week, but when he did, he picked some winning subjects. Introducing “Wildflower and Barley,” he spoke about beekeeping, a hobby he took up while living alone in the Irish countryside, and the effects he observed of the tiniest changes on homing instincts at a difficult climate and elevation.

And then later, during the encores, while his band vamped for six or seven minutes through the instrumental intro to “Nina Cried Power,” he talked about the effect of the tiniest changes in human behavior on cultural shifts, drawing links between the grass roots of women’s suffrage, America’s civil rights movement, LGBTQ rights and the need for a negotiated peace in Gaza.

Somewhere between these two speeches, it occurred to me that Hozier is the best youngish, mainstream rock star we’ve got right now. Not because of his urging fans to contact their legislators, or the bees, although these things didn’t hurt.

A lot of music fans probably don’t even think of Hozier as a “rock star” per se, maybe because they think he’s too good for the part. The Irish singer-songwriter has a perceived virtuousness and an actual virtuosity, either one of which could be disqualifying by some aggro standards. After he’d built up this reputation for being a brilliant, polite and generally admirable character, there was something funny about the fact that it took recording as uncharacteristic a single as “Too Sweet” for him to finally get his first No. 1 hit in the U.S. … probably the first song he’s ever written specifically from the point of view of a cad. It turns out he’s not so earnest that he can’t have some fun role-playing being an unserious person.  

Mind you, Hozier is a monster, but only musically. In his two-hour-plus Forum opener, marking his own distinctive territory, he came off as just about equal parts Joni Mitchell, Fairport Convention, Clannad and the Black Keys, claiming the best parts of the last 60 years’ worth of folk-rock conventions but also an acuity with bluesiness and big power chords amid the intricate tunings, time-signature changes and masterful finger-picking. It felt deeply refined, in the best sense, and like arena-rock, too — which is a compliment, too, if just this once.

After touring globally behind his third album, last year’s “Unreal Unearth,” for a year and a half now, his show is terrifically well-honed. It started off with “De Selby (Part 1),” a pretty ethereal song rooted in an obscure bit of fantastical European literature, with English eventually giving way to Irish-language lyrics, subtitled on the big screens on either side of the stage, before things became completely churchy and choral. Maybe nothing in that list sounds like your idea of a fun Saturday night, but the kicker to that intro was (you guessed it) “De Selby (Part 2),” which delivered on the heavier rock front. Before long Hozier was deep into his freshly released EP of outtakes with “Nobody’s Soldier,” a deeply fuzzy rocker that sounds like something out of a rock-and-soul revue that has been overlaid with the tones of a decelerating jet engine.

“Still feeling good? I will do my best to change that, swear to God,” he promised, somewhere around the time that “Eat Your Young” gave way to “Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene.” (How neither of those titles provided Hozier with his first U.S. No. 1 is anyone’s guess.) Hozier’s themes can be as feel-bad as promised, in bits and pieces; this is a fellow who themed his latest album around Dante’s circles of hell, and who reserves a stripped-down domestic abuse song (“Cherry Wine”) for the first encore slot on the B-stage. But getting truly depressive is an empty threat, when more celebrative numbers like the hand-clappy, soul-music-celebrating “Almost (Sweet Music)” are there to pick up the mood slack.

Although he’s only released three full albums in his 10-year recording career, Hozier already has an embarrassment of possible concert riches, to the point that he’s already jettisoned some pretty fantastic songs from “Unreal Unearth” that were included in last year’s shows (like “Damage Gets Done” and “Astract (Psychopomp)”) to make room for three newer songs from the pair of EPs he’s put out in 2024. “Too Sweet,” obviously, is the star of these — one of many songs in the set that show just how much he loves a good bottom end, with bass and guitar blending as one faintly nasty instrument, underneath that undeniable pop hook. But watching him bring out opening act Allison Russell to coo with him on the same EP’s pop-folk “Wildflower and Barley,” you’d never guess he’d get anywhere above a Cat Stevens level of gnarliness.

Highlights included “Eat Your Young,” a true banger — the Jonathan-Swiftie title notwithstanding — with some tremolo guitar licks that suggest what a strong electric guitar soloist Hozier could be if he cut himself more slack; “Dinner and Diatribes,” a furious song with such a tricky guitar riff, it fools you into thinking it’s one of his weird time-signature songs, even though it’s a straight ¾; “Francesca,” which gets much simpler with an anthemic chorus that has the drummer pounding away on quarter notes; and “It Will Come Back,” which had the star bringing out a resonator guitar for something as close as he’s going to get to the gutbucket blues.

Whether he’s playing acoustic or electric, fans can always be grateful for the big screens alongside the stage (vertical ones, perhaps in deflection to the TikTok generation) for providing handy glimpses of his phenomenally precise finger work. This offers a chance for a deeper appreciation of the odd, signature picking style style has him keeping the index finger on his right hand perpetually afloat and above the fray, as useless to him as a vestigial tail.

The singer Bedouine was his guest for all three nights at the Forum, coming out to recreate their duet on the new EP’s “That You Are.” But almost the entire 2024 has provided a chance for Hozier to celebrate his opening act, Allison Russell, who with him has been responsible for the year’s most potent ongoing double bill. Besides “Wildflower and Barley,” he brings Russell back out for the closing encore number, “Work Song,” describing her to the audience as “one of the greatnfreedom singers of our time…. and a very bright light in this world and a very bright light in my life.” He is known for elevating Mavis Staples by name and vocal inclusion in the recorded version of “Nina Cried Power,” of course (a song that provides a showcase for backing singer Melissa McMillan in concert now)… and, in his ongoing championing of Russell, Hozier clearly knows a Mavis successor when he hears one.

In Tuesday’s Forum show, Hozier noted that Russell’s casting in “Hadestown” on Broadway, starting next month, had just been announced that day. Russell used the occasion to bring a song called “Persephone” back into her set — a song coincidentally named after her first girlfriend, even though the “Hadestown” character of that name that she’ll be portraying in New York may share few characteristics with the young love she credits with helping save her life.

Russell’s 40-minute set was hugely well-received by the Forum crowd, and her music has plenty of parallels to Hozier’s own that helped make it a natural fit, even before their shared philanthropic preoccupations. The Grammy-winning “Eve Was Black” was even more rock ‘n’ roll than Americana in this concert setting, and “Demons,” another cut from her “The Returner” album, got funkier and throatier. “Superlover,” a song resurrected from her previous, pre-solo act, Birds of Chicago, had new lyrics, invoking Israel, Palestine and her current adopted home in Tennessee.

Russell also gave a plug for National Suicide Prevention Month, even as she was announcing the “Hadestown” news, saying, “If you had told me when I was 14 and 15 years old, sleeping on park benches or in the … because I was safer in the cemetery than I was in the home of the adopted family who called themselves my family, but who harmed me brutally for over a decade… when I did not believe I would live to make it to 18… that (I would be) now on Broadway, if you had told me that life could this good, I wouldn’t have believed you. If it can get better for me, it can get better for anybody.”

Another thing Hozier and Russell share: a nearly pathological (in a good way) commitment to naming seemingly every crew member as well as each band member by the end of a set. In Hozier’s case, that extends all the way to the production assistant, house engineer, guitar technician and carpenters. Whatever your mama might have told you about holding out for someone who treats “the help” well… maybe that should apply to our rock stars, too.