Hippo Campus celebrate homecoming at the Armory
April 25, 2022
On Saturday evening at the Armory, Twin Cities band Hippo Campus made their 33rd and final stop on their U.S. tour, with the U.K. leg beginning in May.
When asked about the progression of the band in a recent interview with The Current, Luppen said, “We had been in other bands in high school, but when we started in Hippo, we just really had no idea what we were doing. We wrote music to make our friends dance.”
An Armory full of friends danced all night as the five-piece group confidently executed a clean and polished set of faithful recreations of their recorded material. The night was loaded with tracks from this year’s LP3 and the 2021 EP Good Dog, Bad Dream.
Although Hippo Campus’ style has fluctuated over the course of their career, the set progressed seamlessly through the eclectic mixes of synth-heavy psychedelic rock to guitar-led pop-rock. It didn’t feel jarring to hear the playful indie melodies from Landmark next to the more recent sonic experimentation.
The on-stage energy flowed well between the five performers. Vocalist and guitarist Jake Luppen stood front and center demonstrating his wide-ranging vocal talents, including a perfected falsetto. A stand-up vocal processor, which altered his voice with high-pitched distortion, was especially strong on “Blew Its.” To his left, vocalist and guitarist Nathan Stocker wiggled his knees and hips while presenting the complex string arrangements of “Understand.” To Luppen’s right, bassist Zach Sutton seamlessly transitioned between a calm demeanor to hopping along lightheartedly, to headbanging. In the rear, Whistler Allen held it all together on the drums.
Trumpeter and percussionist DeCarlo Jackson played an essential role. His trumpet brought intricate, powerful harmonies to more mellow tracks like “Scorpio” and “Listerine.” He also played a small drum set, cowbell, and tambourine. Even from the back of the stage, the liveliness of his dancing in place was a visual highlight.
Before playing “Baseball” from the warm glow EP, Stocker asked, “Where were you in 2017?” My mind floated back to November 2017 when leaves fell in Minneapolis’ Dinkytown neighborhood.
A jaw-dropping moment came at the end of “Where to Now?” when Luppen swung his guitar to the ground multiple times with a combo of hyper-masculine and childish energy. At first, it was hard to tell if he was pretending or legitimately smashing his guitar. Finally, the instrument broke into pieces. Raising his arms overhead, he said, “Hell yeah, dude.” Not all touring musicians can afford to sacrifice instruments this way, so the performative act felt like another sign of the band’s surging confidence in front of the sold-out Armory.
In any case, judging by the movement and audio levels in the crowd, the most beloved tracks in the set were throwbacks. The gigantic hooks and catchy choruses from “Way It Goes,” “Suicide Saturday,” and “South” had the entire floor jumping up and down, clapping with hands in the air. Everyone loudly sang, “You go down south, south,” while Jackson jogged across the stage, shaking the tambourine. For the encore, the band closed with their most streamed track, “Buttercup.”
The exultant environment overshadowed a few more-recent songs with narratives some listeners might find juvenile. Is the band trying to be funny or edgy on “Sex Tape” when singing, “Would you film my sex tape?” or was Stocker being ironic on “Deepfake,” with the line, “Music sucks, people change, do as many drugs as you can / Probs won't ever be this good again”? On “Boys,” Luppen repeated the lyrics: “Kissing boys, missing work / Got hungover from your words / Same New York, it's the worst / All these nights are a blur / Going broke, make it rain.” Still, the band’s musicianship elevated surface-level lines into infatuating anthems within the enchanting ambiance of sweaty, bouncing bodies.
When Hippo Campus addressed the crowd, it was mainly statements of gratitude and disbelief. Band members appeared honored and overjoyed to play in the sold-out venue. Stocker called the experience a “dream come true,” and Luppen labeled it the best day of his life. “I’m speechless. This is so f***ing crazy,” Luppen said.
In a recent Instagram post, the group stated: “Back when they announced that the armory was being turned into a venue in ~2013… Naturally, we joked about how someday we would play the future venue, all the while happy with that plan being left as a fantasy.” Saturday night made that fantasy a reality. Another accomplishment they announced was a “Hippo Campus” star introduced to the top of First Avenue’s iconic exterior wall.
The crowd witnessed the group carry out the initiative they set nine years ago. That’s the way it goes when a hometown band returns to the place where their musical career blossomed.
The opener, Californian songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Lew, who goes by the stage name Ginger Root, brought his groovy soul bedroom-pop to the stage. With fingers grazing over sparkling key chords, he asked the audience to continually repeat the word “I” during the song “Weather.” In the chorus’ line, “And I, I can't help it all the times,” the crowd yelled the second “I.” That one word carried some of the loudest screaming inside the Armory all night.
Setlist:
2 Young 2 Die
Ashtray
Bad Dream Baby
Blew Its
Semi Pro
Bang Bang
Sex Tape
Honestly
Suicide Saturday
Scorpio
Listerine
Monsoon
Vacation
Ride or Die
Way It Goes
Deepfake
Baseball
Where To Now?
South
Boys
Understand
Encore:
Bambi
Buttercup
P.S. On the way to the show, my Lyft driver was listening to 89.3 FM. I said, “I see you’re listening to the Current.” She responded, “My son showed me this station when he moved to the Twin Cities, and now it’s my favorite.”
