As Allie Spaltro, frontwoman of Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, approached the stage at Chicago’s Schubas, she peered down and carefully arranged her go-to devices to lift her music from the stage. Organized in succession of importance, she had a bottle of water, her tuning and distortion pedals, and a cup of tea along side honey in a plastic bear-mold. Although it wasn’t evident until some subtle coughs and a horse talking voice surfaced at the end of “Bird Balloons”, Spaltro was working through from a pestering cold. After experiencing the problem throughout the past week of touring, the artist held her cold remedies in hand and was ready to lift her vocals with an energy she may have thought never existed.
Though “Bird Balloons” was shy of the gnarling anger resonating in the final verse along with other spring-loaded vocal statements, the young crooner reveled an impressive vocal performance. Even climbing to reach the height of her vocal range didn’t phase her confidence as she shelled smooth, honey-coated vocal pitches to swoon the audience. Ms. Lady Lamb mustered up an admirable confidence to perform her music in the best way fashionable, which became even more evident as she strummed alone to some of Ripely Pine‘s most intimate tracks and demo “Between Two Trees”.
As these songs varied between the twang of a banjo and the smooth strums from her Fender Jazzmaster, her band completed the mix with gentle and gliding grooves. The live atmosphere allowed the performers to stretch each song appropriately to allow every instrument to stand out. A beauty that is unique to Schubas is the lack of a large sound system, ultimately requiring bands to achieve the perfect mix through their amps. This element played in the Lady Lamb the Beekeeper’s favor as backing vocals broaden the beauty of Spaltro’s tenor, bass lines scaled along the top of the neck with pristine, and pungent cracks from the drum kit.
Before reaching the conclusion of her set, Spaltro called on the audience to sing along with her, covering up her almost-faded vocal chords within the closing tracks’ challenging vocal melodies. Conducting the metaphorical “bouncing Mickey Mouse head’, as she likes to call it, Spaltro led the crowd in sing-a-longs that allowed the songs to drive forward. While some consider it reminiscing a device used in Disney movies, this moment indicated Lady Lamb’s growing success since the release of her debut, Ripley Pine. In her on-stage comment of her time spent between deferring her trip to college and reaching the intimate Chicago stage, she commented with “no regret.”
