Review | Wallows Pack a Wallop of Delights at the Santa Barbara Bowl

Any expectations I may have had that an indie band with a name like Wallows might come on stage wailing about their woes were quickly stomped out by the excited — mostly young and female — crowds greeting them with high-pitched cheers and a sea of cell phones snapping pics of the highly instagrammable twenty-somethings on stage at the Bowl last week.

Band members Dylan Minnette (vocals, guitar), Braeden Lemasters (vocals, guitar), and Cole Preston (drums) — who began playing together as young teenagers in 2011 — quickly proved that they were far more than just pretty faces. After a dramatic, silhouetted-behind-a-screen start, they kicked off their appealingly energetic set with “Do Not Wait,” segueing into “Your Apartment,” “Anytime, Always” and “Don’t You Think It’s Strange.”

“It’s been an incredible tour, but it feels really good to be back in SoCal,” said Minnette, a Van Nuys San Fernando Valley guy who I recognized from his impressive performance as an actor in the Netflix drama 13 Reasons Why. He reportedly gave up acting to focus on music, which seems like it was a good bet. After late summer, early fall performances in venues like New York’s Madison Square Garden and Los Angeles’s Kia Forum, Wallows heads to Amsterdam, Paris, Brussel, Germany, the UK, and Australia for a worldwide tour in support of their spring 2024 album release Model, which is their third LP.

Other songs in the set included “Quarterback” (with Preston singing lead rather than Minnette), “Bad Dream,” “You (Show Me Where My Days Went),” and “These Days,” with the audience singing along loudly to the lyrics, “Your mother don’t approve of the way that you’ve been living / She says he puts you through it / You shouldn’t let him do it / And if there is a voice in your head, don’t listen to it.”

Like “These Days,” the amusingly titled “1980s Horror Film” generated a loud chorus of audience members singing with the lyrics:  “I looked into her eyes / And tried to make her mine / But then she said: ‘I’m really not that into guys.’”

After some pretty high energy songs, including “Missing Out,” which they introduced as a new song they hadn’t sung yet on the tour, the band pulled in close together for a stripped down acoustic segment, which was a nice change of pace — especially when there was a surprise guest vocal appearance by Remi Wolf, who was in town to play her own solo show at the Bowl the following night.

Then it was back to high energy antics, with “Pleaser” and “Calling After Me” (the most familiar song of the night for me). The still screaming fans demanded “one more song” and were treated to an encore of two. First up, their hit “Are You Bored Yet?” followed by “Only Ecstasy,” an excellent capper for a very fun night at the Bowl.