Written by Annie Wu
LOS ANGELES - Emmett Rogers Fightmaster, known as E. R. Fightmaster, brought The Tolerance Tour featuring their debut full-length album to a close with a hometown celebration. Performing under the stylized moniker FIGHTMASTER, they played their last show of the year at the Teragram Ballroom on October 15 with support by the alt-pop band ill peach.
Setting the stage for the night was ill peach, featuring Jess Corazza on lead vocals, Pat Morrissey on synths, Jesse Schuster on guitar, and touring drummer Jon Smith. The set heavily featured tracks from their sophomore album, EAVESDROPPING. Before diving into DANDELION, Corazza noted that while they don’t perform this song often, it always seems to be a crowd favorite.
She later brought a wave of laughter over the crowd when introducing RODEO, jokingly mentioning that this song was featured in a recent Apple commercial, which technically made them “sponsored by Apple,” before claiming she personally preferred to use a dumb phone. The energy in the room peaked with their final song, HUSH, which physically pulled the crowd in closer to the stage. Everyone was dancing along, providing a perfect transition into the main event.
The energetic atmosphere set the perfect baseline as FIGHTMASTER finally stepped onto the stage. Followed by their touring band, including guitarist Patrick Dean, pianist Nicholas Gage, and drummer April Lee, FIGHTMASTER began their set singing while playing the bass, instantly setting the mood for the night. After a few songs, FIGHTMASTER playfully complained about the crowd looking lopsided in their perspective because everyone appeared heavily packed onto their left side view of the crowd.
After the room balanced out, the band continued through the set with a blend of alt-rock energy and intimate, slow-burning ballads, such as Nobody’s Baby, which FIGHTMASTER proudly introduced as a personal favorite in their discography. The emotional peak of the night came during a suite of songs dubbed as “Gay Prom,” during which FIGHTMASTER encouraged the audience to slow-dance while pretending the band was not in the room.
Noting that this tour stop was their final show on the road for the year, FIGHTMASTER took a moment to express their gratitude, telling the crowd, "I'm part of my favorite community in the world, the queer community." The gentle, romantic atmosphere stretched flawlessly across several tracks, including performances of Minotaur and the titular track Tolerance. They occasionally broke the immersion to check in on the floor, calling out a playful, "How's gay prom going?" before ending this suite with Bloodshed Baby.
The vibe dramatically shifted when FIGHTMASTER declared, “It’s after prom,” and pivoted right into the raw, upbeat energy of Glide. Before diving into their high-energy second half of the show, FIGHTMASTER announced that it was their favorite actor’s birthday the next day and orchestrated a perfectly synchronized “Happy Birthday” from the audience, to which the actor in the crowd yelled a big “Thank you!” from the balcony.
Alongside an amazing guitar solo from Dean, the performance of Cowboy Tumbleweed saw two toy squeaking chickens that were picked up during a previous tour stop, with a bigger chicken named Trandy and the other chicken named Trandice, hilariously crowd-surfing around the venue. Specifically mentioning that it had been about 16 minutes since the chickens' crowd-surfing began and saying the chickens were “fragile”, FIGHTMASTER joked, "You passed those chickens for a long time; it's okay if they're dead!"
As the main set wound down with a performance of Quicksand, FIGHTMASTER pulled the classic stunt of joking about playing what was announced as the last song of the night while dryly warning the crowd, "Don't stick around at the end." Sure enough, after just a few beats of thunderous chanting, they burst back onto the stage alongside the band for the encore.
Up front, a dedicated couple of fans took the late-night intensity to heart, heavily headbanging through the blistering, raw rhythms of the encore tracks, Bad Man, Emmett, and BRICK X BRICK. Before playing the finale, FIGHTMASTER shared that BRICK X BRICK was written about “killing our enemies,” and it was specifically added to the live rotation after they learned about the 2024 high-profile case with Cornell University’s Chi Phi making headlines. Instructing the crowd to treat the track like a collective spell and sing it as loud as possible, the venue erupted in a sing-along that officially brought The Tolerance Tour to a beautifully triumphant close.
