Concert Review: Love Spells at Club Dada
Club Dada isn't built for quiet music. It's a bar-and-stage room in Deep Ellum with concrete floors and a sound system tuned for bands that lean into volume, not away from it. Love Spells has built his sound on restraint: hushed vocals, dream pop textures, songs that feel like someone talking to you up close. That contrast should have been a problem. It wasn't, and it didn't stop the show from selling out.
Orca opened the show and warmed up the room, giving the crowd time to settle in before Love Spells's band took the stage. By the time he came on, the venue had filled in tight and most of the talking had stopped.
Love Spells treats intimacy as a performance choice, not just a lyric topic. His album, Love Is the Law, runs on that idea: love as something almost sacred, privacy as its own form of closeness. Live, his band plays into that. The guitars stayed quiet in the mix, the rhythm section kept a steady pace instead of pushing volume, and Love Spells had space to do the thing his songs depend on shifting between his normal voice and his falsetto without warning.
That shift was clearest on “Keep It to Yourself,” a song already about keeping certain things private. Love Spells moved from his chest voice into that high, airy register in an instant, with no buildup and no visible effort, and the crowd reacted the way people do when something happens live that a recording can't fully show. Hearing that switch on a record is one thing. Watching him do it a few feet away, and make it look easy, is another.
Love Spells is a Houston native, and the last time he came through Dallas, it was as part of Kevin Abstract's Blush run, rapping rather than singing. Seeing him back in town fronting his own show and doing it almost entirely in that falsetto he's built his name on, made the change in direction even more obvious. It's a shift that suits him, and one that made this the more memorable of his two Dallas appearances.
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