Surprise Chef Make Them Happy at Music Hall of Williamsburg on Thursday Night
Surprise Chef – Music Hall of Williamsburg – July 10, 2025
Last night at Music Hall of Williamsburg, Surprise Chef took the stage to walkout music and then proceeded to joke about walking out to walkout music, asking whether it was cringy or classy. I’m not sure those are the only two options and over the following 90 minutes, the Melbourne, Australia, quintet evoked several other adjectives where neither classy nor cringy would do.
The set broke down into four suites of music. The opening stretch lasted 20 minutes, opened with “Sleep Dreams,” off their latest record, Superb, and might best be described as funky or possibly nasty (the good kind) with a twist of psychedelic. A steady rhythm guitar from Lachlan Stuckey matched the taffy-pull bass playing of Carl Lindeberg and syncopated drumming of Andrew Congues while Jethro Curtin navigated an array of keyboards and synthesizers to the grooviest corners of the packed house.
Songs flowed from one to the next, the opener evolving to “Fare Evader” with alien birdsong coming from the synth, flowing “Talent Stick” characterized by Hudson Whitlock’s funky glockenspiel over a darker theme, and finally ending in “Bully Ball.” The rapt crowd erupted at the pause, snapping out of the dance trance, words like blissful and sweaty doing the job.
The other quarters of the show followed a similar arc: The second suite featured older material like “Deadlines,” which went from a ’70s-spy-movie vibe where maybe the dialogue is cringy but the soundtrack slaps. Again, the band showed their propensity to build and mutate, the spy film turning into a daytime-game-show theme and finally a keys-led sci-fi adventure. Each break in the action elicited a more enthusiastic response from the audience.
The final stanza proved to be the deepest of them all, centered on “Have You Fed the Baby Huey Today,” a carnival fun house of groove, with reality-distorting mirrors and trapdoors. Even as they kept everybody in the room moving, Surprise Chef proved to be strongest when they were slowest and let the music flow without hurry, and they returned to this mindset for the set-closing “All News is Good News,” with its slinky guitar plink and more percussive bells. At their most artful, they might have approached classy for a moment there but based on Surprise Chef’s reaction to the crowd’s considerable energy, it’s safe to say that the one word that fit here was happy. —A. Stein | @Neddyo
Photo courtesy of A. Stein
