Concert review: Jeremy Messersmith @ World Café Live
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
It needs to be stated first that Jeremy Messersmith is the cutest guitar dude out there.
[ 2/6 ] It needs to be stated first that Jeremy Messersmith is the cutest guitar dude out there. He could stand silently onstage with nothing but a baby-faced smirk and those thick-framed glasses and the audience would still be entertained. But he has talent, too, evident during last night’s intimate show at World Café Live Upstairs, during which Messersmith played folksy pop songs from 2010’s The Reluctant Graveyard and the newly-released Heart Murmurs. Most were supported by his four-piece band, but the standouts were acoustic, like the tearjerker “A Girl, a Boy and a Graveyard,” and the tenderly tongue-in-cheek “I Wanna Be Your One Night Stand.” Before beginning that one, Messersmith joked, “This is a love song written the best way I know how.”
Which brings us back to him being the cutest guitar dude. The Upstairs portion of World Café does not encourage crowd participation; everyone’s condemned to tiny candlelit tables or barstools. But its small size does encourage the performer to mingle afterwards, much to the delight of the handful of twenty-something fangirls and fanguys who stuck around to get their new, hot pink Heart Murmurs records signed. Some of them could even be heard squealing as he walked by on his way to the merch table. (Okay, that was me.) Heart murmurs, indeed.
