Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER The year is 1977. Eleven-year-old me is sitting on my best friend’s bunk bed listening to his older brother’s copy of Electric Light Orchestra’s Out Of The Blue on the Hi-Fi, staring at the neon starburst-colored spaceship on the gatefold sleeve which, he informed me, was used to clean your weed on. Being 11 I had no earthly idea why somebody would collect weeds nor why they would want to clean them, and said as much. My best friend didn’t seem to really know either, but said he had it on good authority, i.e. his older […]

Interpol by JOSH PELTA-HELLER If it’s intimidating to open a sold out show for a band as influential as Interpol, any trepidation was well-hidden by Brooklyn punk outfit Honduras. They banged through a set that seemed like a Joy Division impression, conjuring images of studded leather jackets and quadruple-pierced earlobes. This may explain why they were tapped for this tour, satiating nostalgic cravings for 80’s post-punk revival. Interpol drew a diverse crowd— I was squeezed between someone’s mom squinting through horn rimmed glasses and a scraggly-bearded barista in denim. Interpol emerged in somber funeral attire, shadows stalking across the stage, […]

Photo by PETE TROSHAK Ben Franklin, in his infinite wisdom, once suggested “Instead of cursing the darkness, light a candle.” Chicago veteran punk rockers Rise Against brought their Mourning in Amerika tour to Philadelphia on Saturday night determined to spread Franklin’s sage advice. On tour in support of their new and altogether excellent Wolves album, Rise Against are now in their 19th year of melding Thin Lizzy guitar heroics to Bruce Springsteen-ian heartland earnestness. Saturday night at the Festival Pier, the band performed in front of a gigantic tarp with an vertical blood red and off-white striped flag bookended by […]

Photo by JONATHAN VALANIA Last night, The Fillmore was levitating three feet high and rising by shoegaze progenitors My Bloody Valentine. The original MBV line-up is currently touring the US for the first time in five years, and, as last night demonstrated, they are still more than capable of blowing minds and melting faces with thick walls of fuzzy reverse reverb. Openers Heavy Blanket, J Mascis’s new three-piece instrumental stoner-rock band, Heavy Blanket, warmed us up for the ear-blasting volume that lay in store. The band seems like a fun little project for Mascis to solo the entire time with […]

Photo by MATT SHAVER The Smashing Pumpkins need no introduction, so I will be brief. By Siamese Dream (1993), arguably one of the greatest albums of the ‘90s, The Smashing Pumpkins had become an unstoppable force in the alt-rock firmament. 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, blew fans away once again. Their fourth studio album, Adore (1998), was exactly that: a door – a door into an entirely new nightmare realm of Pumpkins, an intimate shadow dance with lead guitarist/vocalist/prophet Billy Corgan’s goth side. Their next venture, 2000’s Machina/The Machine Of God were the last recordings put out before […]

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER Bathed in blood-red hot lamps at PhilaMOCA on Thursday night, art-rock co-conspirators Kim Gordon and Bill Nace sculpted the dystopic psychedelia of their now seven-year-old project Body/Head: a twin complement of electric guitar distortion, at turns cauterizing, captivating, cacophonous. For roughly forty minutes, Gordon writhed with her low-slung stratocaster, occasionally chanting unintelligible mantras into her mic, and hurling fuzz and feedback at Nace to reshape and return. Where Steve Gunn’s instrumental opening set was a sprawling release of scale meditations and soaring solos, Body/Head was the sonic obverse, with noisy chord-warps, urgent incantations and a dark, […]

Photo by MARK LIKOSKY Under the oppressive hair-frizzing humidity of midsummer in Philadelphia, swarms of indie music blog readers dressed in overalls and pinstripes filed into the massive Tower Theater for, yes that’s right, a fully seated show. But whether it was this heat, or astrological patterns like the approaching lunar eclipse and beginning of Mercury’s retrograde, a calm head-rolling evening felt like the perfect way to absorb every frequency of energy this Baltimore duo had brought with them to Upper Darby. After a charming and surprisingly comedic opening set from fellow Baltimore artist, Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, the room […]

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER Late last night, Raphael Saadiq and his band took their seated places onstage at Union Transfer, under deep blue lights, and treated a capacity Tuesday-night crowd to a soaring instrumental, a sort of somber pre-meal prayer. It was as formal as the night would get, as the magnetic master of ceremonies rose to spark an enduring discourse with frenetic fans, trading dialogue and taking requests — even offering up his mic for a verse — as incandescent stage lights alternated with house lights throughout as if to cue continued conversation. Saadiq engaged with lengthy stories and […]

Photo by MATT SHAVER I have no control over the Spotify playlist when cruising the highways and byways with my wee men, and while I am afforded at least one or two selections over a 40-minute span, the majority of my time behind the wheel is scored by the likes of Drake, Post Malone and Logic. Yet the most inexplicable queue add of late was Toto’s “Africa,” which only after a cursory screen-face peek revealed itself to be a Weezer cover. From 2018. If you read the backstory on why THAT cover, it all but underlines the band’s enduring appeal. […]

PHOTO BY JOSH PELTA-HELLER As a rule, I hate concerts with hand-clapping. The one and only exception to my rule is Beck last night at the Festival Pier on the final stop of Colors tour. Having long worshipped the 90’s experimental rock god from the first time my dad played “Loser” for me on a car radio back in 2008, finally seeing him live was surreal to say the least. As the band opened with an earth-shaking rendition of “Devils Haircut,” the stage lit up with a colorfully morphing visual display on the two-story back screen. The vibrant 90’s designs […]

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER Under the ethereal light of a half moon, I kicked up sand with every step closer to the stage at Festival Pier. The six members of Arcade Fire wove a path through the crowd under glaring spotlight, mobbed on either side by ecstatic fans. There was a blip in the beginning of their set, as Win Butler paused the show to summon First Aid for a concertgoer, a typically conscientious and empathetic gesture. Recovering, the band launched into “No Cars Go,” off Neon Bible. A diverse range of instruments were used to create their dynamic, ever-evolving […]

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER A couple years back, James Alex’s new pop punk project Beach Slang was catapulted into the national spotlight, and nobody was more surprised by the attention than him. During interviews conducted around around the time of their first tour (including one with Phawker), Alex would cite a personal benchmark for his songwriting to which he referred as “the campfire test.” “What I do is,” Alex explained, “I challenge myself with, can it hold up if it’s just me and my acoustic guitar?,” and reasoned, “if it can hold up in that simplest form, then there’s some […]

Photo by DYLAN LONG The Foo Fighters have been a band for 24 years. That’s longer than I’ve been alive. When you’re in a band for that long — rehearsing, producing new albums, touring — I think it’s safe to assume that you dig what you do. A lot. So much so, that over 20 years later, you’re still out there on stage having the absolute time of your life. And lo and behold, on a beautiful July night in Camden, the Foo Fighters brought the house down in front of tens of thousands in a three-hour musical bonanza that […]