La Dispute @ The First Unitarian Church.

Text and image by Tyler Horst.

A packed house doesn’t usually make for an intimate experience, but La Dispute accomplished both at the First Unitarian Church on Saturday, where the band played the first in a series of special “sit-down” shows to a sold-out crowd in the sanctuary.

“We wanted to try this in cities that have been especially kind to us over the years,” said frontman Jordan Dreyer. “One of those cities has definitely been Philadelphia.”

For the duration of the night, La Dispute played stripped down arrangements of their highly emotional post-hardcore music. Dreyer expressed feelings of apprehension at performing in such a vulnerable mode but the receptive audience seated in the pews projected a very warm Philadelphia welcome for the band.

Most of the songs were adapted from La Dispute’s most recent, more experimental release Rooms of the House. During a Q&A session that served as an interlude for the set, the band took questions from the crowd. Along with their special guest Will Yip, who produced Rooms, the band shared many intimate stories about recording the album just outside the city at Studio 4 in Conshohocken. Dreyer recounted spending much of the winter recording sessions in the studio and wandering the Philadelphia area with debilitating writer’s block, even going in to the city to buy Thanksgiving dinner from a Wawa.

The band closed with another set of artfully restrained renditions of their songs, both old and new. With requests to not record film or video, and all the lights on in a church sanctuary, La Dispute created a fresh and uniquely intimate experience of the band for a very appreciative audience.