Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER Headlining an indie rock triple-threat bill supported by Maryn Jones’ Yowler and Palberta, Speedy Ortiz laid waste to the First Unitarian Church’s basement last night. Leading the charge was vocalist Sadie Dupuis, stage-stomping in her tennis sneaks, thrashing her trademark pale salmon-colored electric flat top with customized headstock featuring her solo pseudonym Sad13. Three full-lengths deep, Speedy can take their pick of plenty of fan faves to fill a nearly two-hour set of straight-up indie rock and roll, with enough guitars and guile to make their forebears proud. There’s echoes of Jenny Lewis’ lyrical smartassery and […]

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER I think most music appreciators have a handful of bands or artists that totally reprogrammed their perception of music. I remember the first time I had listened to Radiohead. In fifth grade, my mom had begun noticing that I was kind of a weird kid, so she gave me two CDs she thought I might like: Kid A and OK Computer, which were given to her by one of her best friends, a photographer and painter named Yelena Yemchuck, who dated Billy Corgan around the turn of the millennium. I stuck the CDs in my disk […]

Photo by DYLAN LONG Nandi Rose Plunkett produces solo music under the moniker Half Waif, a name that conjures the idea of a small and helpless creature – but the singer-songwriter is anything but. Plunkett towered over a synthesizer in a red dress patterned with rose petals and hair in space buns. With her eyes closed and hands joined in prayer, I half-expected her to levitate above the stage. The set drew from her latest release, Lavender, an work punctuated with intimate portraits of human life, touching on themes of family, love and mortality. The lyrics read like poetic fairy […]

Photo by HENRY SAVAGE On a similarly cold and rainy night last April, I caught Ty Segall on tour with his band in support of his earlier 2018 record, Freedom’s Goblin. (Since then, he’s put out two more albums – Joy, a collaboration with White Fence, and Fudge Sandwich, eleven tracks of his favorite psych-rock covers.) That night seven months ago changed my whole idea of what a modern rock concert could be. The venue shook under the force of Segall’s unwieldy guitar power, and the front barrier I was pressed up against threatened to collapse under the weight of […]

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER Every light in the room went to black, and a buzz of distortion grew into a thundering roar until overhead lights bathed the room in red, and the goth Britpop band Pale Waves took the stage. Surrounding a pale-faced black-lipsticked Heather Baron-Gracie were her bandmates – a pair of lanky indie boys Charlie Wood and Hugo Silvani, and fellow goth queen and Pale Waves co-founder Ciara Doran. Soon that droning background distortion morphed into the synthy build at the start of “Television Romance,” prompting Baron-Gracie to stomp around in robotic doll-like dance moves. The dramatic contrast […]

Photo by MATT SHAVER “Who’s playing in there tonight?” said a passerby outside of the Tower last night. “Hanson,” I said. “Hanson? You mean ‘mmmmmmbop’ Hanson?” “Yeah.” “They’re still around? Good for them.” I try to keep up, but things change so often, I inevitably lose track of bands, and I feel the worst about the 90s. “MmmBop” was a blip on everyones radar, but that jet blew past me and off to the horizon. Hanson, alongside acts like The Presidents of USA and Spin Doctors, went in to some vault in my brain that has only recently been opened […]

Photo by HENRY SAVAGE Last night, fans of hometown hero Ron Gallo gathered in the basement of the First Unitarian Church to welcome his return in glorified house show style. As Coltrane deep cuts played between sets of bluesy Laurel Canyon harmonies from two Nashville-based openers Twen and Ian Ferguson, locals exchanged beers, handshakes, and tales of the last time they saw Gallo play the church. Having found his music a few months ago through Instagram posts from one of his tour photographers, I let these exaggerated claims of Gallo’s “indescribable awesomeness” feed my anticipation. The band members emerged, each […]

Photo by MARK LIKOSKY With the perfect certainty of a heavy ocean wave crashing upon the shore, Low is a force of nature. That wave may start off small, might eat you up and crash you into the rocks or it may lift you higher into the suns rays. Although they still rock the slowcore vibe which they were only loosely associated with, Low now also has this sort of “I-don’t-know-but-whatever-it-is-I-like-it-core” vibe in that each album wiggles around different genres while still maintaining their strange and peaceful aesthetic. When they first started getting a bit more poppy I suppose I […]

PHOTO BY HENRY SAVAGE Last night at World Cafe Live, the age range of the audience was so diverse it was likely you saw your mom’s tennis partner Regina and the neighborhood pest Shane who just started high school. That’s the appeal of Darwin Deez, regardless of who you are, he’s still going to have you on your feet and bouncing to his indie pop hits. If you aren’t dancing as hard as he is, he’ll drop down into the crowd to show you how. Even his opener brought fire to the stage, Soren Bryce, a badass electronic pop musician […]

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER Last night, the kitschy-cool underground of Philadelphia gathered at First Unitarian to worship at the altar of Shannon & The Clams, one of the only modern bands whose sound is a manifestation of a rock and roll that reaches from the Ronettes to The Clash, and everything that’s followed. The sold-out crowd was dappled with heads of hair as vibrantly colorful as the wigs in the video for “Backstreets” (see below) off their new LP, Onion. Crowned in shades of lavender and burnt orange and neon green, fans of the Oakland retro rockers dressed in loud […]