Photo by GRAHAM TOLBERT Pasted on every door of the venue were warnings of extreme strobe lighting. The heavy promise of a twisted psychedelic dream that would channel both the cabin fever seclusion of Bon Iver’s early music and the cryptic auto-tuned voice of 2016’s 22, A Million grew closer with Feist’s preparatory words, “Your hearts will be turned into a flock of pastel geese flying into the future,” at the end of her opening set. With the sudden darkness and quick flashes of hallucinatory art across stage-bookending screens as the i,i intro “Yi” played in the background of Bon […]

Photo by ALEX PATERSON-JONES Philly loves their own. The crowd, crammed into a warehouse somewhere in Northern Liberties last night, went wild for the performances of three Philly-born artists’ Hop Along, Tierra Whack and Orion Sun, at the opening of the 4-day House of Vans event. Indie rock band Hop Along—which is comprised of two siblings, front-woman Frances Quinlan and her brother Mark  on drums — opened for Tierra Whack. Live, Frances’ voice is an enigma— think a chain-smoking baby, crude and rustic, pulsing in its ragged rawness. That voice’s full-throatedness pierced the venue, making the audience empathize with the […]

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER Those familiar with the smaller stage at Underground Arts may know that seven musicians is at least three too many for a space of that size. A small extension was added centerstage on Thursday night for White Fence frontman Tim Presley, like a mini-catwalk, but the garage rock anti-hero hardly took advantage of it in the conventional sense, using it instead to edge up his mic only slightly to give the rest of his band just a little breathing room in the wings. Presley comes off as demure, unassuming and refreshingly unpretentious, his shirt tucked into […]

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER Lucinda Williams has a cold. Less than a minute into “Right on Time,” her first song of the night, she stepped back from the microphone saying “shit” under her breath, to reach for a tissue while she shook her head in agitated dismay at someone backstage. The annoyance on her face made me fear a stoic, empty performance lay ahead, or worse yet, a shortened-set meltdown. If her sandpapery voice could barely make it through the first verse of “Right on Time,” there was no way she’d be able to perform the straining high-range melodies of […]

Photo by MATT SHAVER Wiping the sweat from her brow, Brittany Howard paused between songs Friday night at The Fillmore to wag her finger at the crowd with a warning: “Be careful now. Don’t fuck around and drive me up.” Fans swallowed her words in a roar of cheers that would do just that, after only two songs in a set that featured every track off of her just released solo full-length debut Jaime. Unable to speak over the unending applause, Howard gave up trying, blowing a kiss to the crowd with a mouthed “love you” before turning back to […]

Photo by ALEX PATERSON-JONES The Dead Milkmen are the band that invariably comes to mind when we think of Philly punk rock. To me, their sound has always stood out against their contemporary punk rockers: no screaming, no harsh distortion or feedback – instead, punk attitude and punk rock song structures accented by surf and funk influence, with no shortage of comedy. Since their humble cassette beginnings in ’83 as a band of fictional characters in the minds of guitarist/vocalist Joe Genaro and his high school friends, Rodney Linderman (vocalist/keyboardist), and Garth (who joined the Air Force), to the full […]