Manila went on an evolution genre journey with Turnover, as no rain nor storm stopped them from capturing the Philippine concert scene on the last day of August!

The Virginia Beach locals, Austin Getz, bassist Danny Dempsey, guitarist Nick Rayfield, and drummer Casey Getz, took off with their Turnover Asian Tour 2023 in Manila in SM North EDSA Skydome and squeezed in more than a decade-long year career in one night.

The Filipino crowd, as always, resonated right with the band with a few familiar faces in the crowd of our very own music scene and showed that we are still deeply connected to the rock genre, despite the rise of pop music in the country.

Synths and Low Light Bulb Feels to Almost Mosh Pits

The band started their act with their latest album, Myself in the Way, tracks that were released last year, effectively putting the crowd in the right mood with their synth play, which is almost somnolent and puts you in a trance. They plucked “Stone Station,” “Tears of Change,” the album title track, “Myself in the Way,” and “Mountains Made of Clouds” from the album. In addition to the setlist was one of the crowd favorites that released the audience from its trance and gave a nod to the band’s early loved genre, which are “Cutting My Fingers Off” and “Humming,” both from their 2015 album, Peripheral Vision. Perhaps this is the band’s most loved and most popular album as this isn’t the last song of the night they played from the LP.

The vocalist Austin Getz greeted the Filipino audience gave the crowd the classic “Mabuhay!” and thanked the crowd for always welcoming them into the country. Some tracks from the Good Nature album also made their way onto the stage, a happier tune the band has previously experimented on with good feel songs like “Super Natural,” “Pure Devotion, Plant, and What Got in The Way. This got the crowd excited and it was evident that the band’s best attraction to the crowd was their fast-paced tracks as tracks from another album full of happy drive feel songs took over the Skydome and made the patrons dance with Plant Sugar, Number on the Gate and Much After Feeling, all from the album “Altogether.” Sneaking into the middle of all this beautiful chaos was their single “Humblest Pleasures.”

The vocalist noted that he feels like the Filipino fans are their long-time friends with the number of times they’ve been back in the country and still welcomed warmly, with the fans still able to sing along with their old and newly released tracks.

The night was then taken over by Peripheral Visions tracks like “New Scream,” “Diazepam,” and the band’s most streamed track on Spotify, “Dizzy on the Comedown” which gives extreme levels of nostalgia. Songtell has described this song as “about being in a tumultuous relationship and yearning for connection beyond the way things have always gone.” And it does. It’s impossible not to connect to this song and it has been a universal agreement among the song’s listeners that it has hit them on a core memory.

And how can you let go of the band after they sing that? The Manila crowd who is always notorious for asking for more asked the band to sing another track for the encore, which almost turned the crowd into a mosh pit with a heavier guitar riff and faster pace than most of the songs of the night, another track from Peripheral Visions, “Take My Head.”

It’s clear that the band has found a home in the country when they said they will come back again as part of the closing words of the concert and band followers cheered on. They even asked for more songs after the encore and insisted that they didn’t want to let go of the pop rock and indie rock band that captured an audience in our country, chasing that high feeling for shoegaze and nostalgia.

Words and Photos by Arielle Elep