At Fenway Park, Hozier delivers a ‘sweet' and spiritual set

Boston Globe

24-06-2025

A great many of Hozier's songs were driven by a similar ambivalence, with a particular focus on the conflation of religion and sex. The churning 'Francesca' was a descent into Hell that felt like catharsis, and 'Take Me to Church' presented him as a supplicant as the walls seemed to fall in. Other less apocalyptic songs offered a soulful spirituality akin to Van Morrison, shown early with 'Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene' and eventually made explicit with his cover of Morrison's 'Sweet Thing,' where he slipped quite comfortably into his fellow Irishman's phrasing and timbre.
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More typically, Hozier sang in a shaded voice that seemed to reverberate from deep within his gut. It could whip up a rumbling storm in the bluesy 'It Will Come Back' and help softer songs like 'De Selby (Part 1)' creep forward. And it carried the gentle murmur of 'Cherry Wine,' performed on his lonesome on a tiny secondary stage midfield, practically by itself. That song may not have been engineered for a stadium to sing along with the way a smash like 'Too Sweet' — its edges sharpened for live performance — was. But the audience sang anyway.
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Amble opened with earnest, if one-note, acoustic folk-pop colored by a wheezing harmonium drone. Gigi Perez followed, also on acoustic guitar but with the energy and fire of an electric band behind her, as she sang songs of yearning with urgency and charm in a keening warble reminiscent of Brandi Carlile in her younger, scrappier days.
HOZIER
With Gigi Perez and Amble. At Fenway Park, Monday
Marc Hirsh can be reached at
or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.
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