The best kinds of album anniversary tours are the ones that go beyond nostalgia and really find a band or artist breathing new life into a classic album, and that’s exactly what Turnover did on Thursday night (6/12) at the first of two Brooklyn Paramount shows on their Peripheral Vision 10th anniversary tour. I saw Turnover a handful of times during the original tour cycle for Peripheral Vision, and it was almost always opening for other bands. When I did finally see them headline (a year after the album’s release), it was during a co-headlining tour with their longtime friends Citizen (who closed the show), and it was at the small Brooklyn club Market Hotel. At no point during the original Peripheral Vision album cycle were Turnover playing back-to-back sold-out nights at 2700-cap venues like Brooklyn Paramount, and as singer/guitarist Austin Getz said on stage last night, they never expected to be.
It’s a testament to the enduring power of Peripheral Vision that it’s exponentially more popular 10 years after its release than it was even two or three years after, and it’s not hard to see why time has treated this album so well. When Turnover released it, it was seen as a risk. After a buzzed-about 2011 self-titled EP and 2012 split with Citizen that saw Turnover dishing out double-time melodic hardcore in the vein of Lifetime, The Movielife, and early Title Fight, followed by a tamer, lukewarmly-received debut album (2013’s Magnolia) that sounded caught between where they started and where they wanted to be, Turnover went all in on a then-newfound love of dream pop for Peripheral Vision. If even the ’90s-emo-inspired Magnolia lacked the energy that Turnover fans wanted, were they really going to respond well to an album that was aiming for Wild Nothing and Beach House? It turned out the answer was a resounding yes, and it made them a whole lot of new fans too. At the time, emo bands were starting to experiment with shoegaze, but doing so was still a relatively novel idea, and Turnover’s punchy mix of dream pop, jangle pop, and post-punk stood out from even their fellow reverb-loving emo kids. Today, shoegaze and shoegaze-adjacent music is at the forefront of guitar-based underground rock music, and Peripheral Vision is one of the albums that pushed younger generations towards hazier sensibilities. It makes sense that it’s bigger than ever and sounds as fresh as ever, because we’re living in an era that this album helped create.
From the minute Austin sang the first line of “Cutting My Fingers Off” on Thursday night, the entire crowd was singing every word with a sense of audible, tangible passion. Though Turnover did fully shed their emo roots on later albums, those roots were still lingering on Peripheral Vision and that’s a big part of why this album is so unique. They were aiming for dream pop but still had the driving backbone of a punk band and the diaristic lyricism of an emo band, and they came out with an album that isn’t quite like anything else in emo or in dream pop–a dichotomy that was on full display at Brooklyn Paramount. The hazy vibes were immaculate last night, thanks to Turnover’s perfectly atmospheric tones and the foggy, pastel-colored light show, and these songs still lent themselves to the emotional, scream-singing catharsis of an emo show. Too many albums force us to choose between vibes music and feelings music, but not Peripheral Vision.
Turnover got some cheers when they asked the crowd who saw them at Market Hotel, but it seemed safe to assume that a lot of people in attendance were seeing a Peripheral Vision set for the first time. During the album’s deepest cuts, it seemed like this was a crowd full of people who had been waiting years to finally see these songs played live. But Thursday night’s show wasn’t just a triumph because Peripheral Vision is a more popular album than it was 10 years ago. Turnover have grown a lot as a band in the decade since its release, and you could feel that growth coming through as they approached these songs in the present day. You could sense that this album means a lot to the band, just like it means a lot to their fans, and they recreated it on stage with urgency and care. They didn’t look like a band that was digging up the past; they looked like a band that was living in the moment. (And on top of Brooklyn Paramount being a big place to see Turnover, the recently-renovated, 97-year-old theater was also a truly gorgeous place to see them.) I’ve seen bands on album anniversary tours take steps to authentically recreate what it felt like to see them in the album’s birth year, but this wasn’t that. This was even better than Turnover were when Peripheral Vision was new.
After playing the album, they played the 2016 track “Change Irreversible” that’s included on the new 10th anniversary reissue of Peripheral Vision, two not-yet-released new songs, and a few tracks from their later albums before closing out the show with another treat: Magnolia‘s “Most of the Time,” which they hadn’t played live since before Peripheral Vision‘s release until breaking it out for this tour. After some tastefully jammy moments during the post-PV portion of the night, “Most of the Time” was a nice, punchy, high-energy note to go out on.
Helping Turnover celebrate Peripheral Vision was the band they’ve been associated with longer than any other band, Citizen, who played a career-spanning set and had the crowd singing along to classics like “The Summer” and newer cuts like “I Want To Kill You” with equal fervor. Before Citizen it was Turnover’s shoegazy Virginia neighbors Keep, who also go very far back with Turnover and who just released a new album, Almost Static. Austin also gave a shoutout on stage to longtime peers Tigers Jaw and Balance & Composure, who opened other dates of the tour.
Turnover, Citizen, and Keep do it again at Brooklyn Paramount tonight (6/13), and the tour wraps up at Long Island’s Paramount Theater on Sunday (6/14). Resale tickets to both shows are still available, and if you’re on the fence, I highly recommend pulling the trigger.
Our exclusive “candied avocado” vinyl variant of the 10th anniversary of Peripheral Vision is sold out, but you can pick up blue marble and citrus marble variants of the expanded reissue (and other Turnover records) in the BV shop. For much more about this album, Austin joined us on the BV podcast ahead of the tour to reflect on it:
And here are some videos of last night…