When I found out Machine Girl was coming to Raleigh, I jumped on tickets so early the openers hadn’t even been announced yet. I sat on those tickets for months, biding my time until the moment of actualization: November 8 at Raleigh’s Lincoln Theatre.
To put it plainly, I wasn’t disappointed — Machine Girl’s performance was riveting, and I haven’t stopped thinking of it since.
Everything about the event was infused with the characteristic uncanniness I’ve come to associate with Machine Girl: spooky fog, strong ambient lighting and buckets upon buckets of sweat.
Stephenson’s stage presence — irreverent, eccentric and interactive — and a melange of chaotic beats and dizzying strobes churned the audience into a frenzy.
I like to say I was fighting for my life in that crowd, the crush of bodies sending those of us in the first two rows sprawling over the barricade. Everyone was desperate to get closer to the music, to reach out and touch Stephenson as he did his rounds about the stage.
I was positively delighted. After catching Machine Girl as the opening act for 100 Gecs back in 2023 and finding myself sufficiently enraged by the audience’s chilly reception to their set, it was a welcome change of pace to see some actual excitement.
The setlist was a perfect compilation of the best of “MG Ultra” and older classics, opening with “…Because I’m Young Arrogant and Hate Everything You Stand For” from the 2017 album of the same name.
“MG Ultra” is a truly inspired release, a pesudo-time capsule for the rollercoaster that is 2024.
The setlist even featured “Dance in the Fire” from the May 2024 EP “SUPER FREQ”
Like the music, Stephenson was ever-moving: dangling off the edge of the stage; dripping sweat into the audience; a languid wrist anointing fans with a cascade of Great Value bottled water.
We loved it. And we absolutely pummeled the living daylights out of each other.
A fellow showgoer’s cell phone video captures Stephenson emerging from the foggy aether of the stage to recieve a sacred gift — a Magic: The Gathering card — which he tosses onto the stage with a sardonic (and long-suffering) flair. An outright mystical exchange, heightened only by the gloomy synths rumbling in the background.
At one point, he darted into the audience for a rendition of “Motherfather,” climbing the stairs to the upper-level seating and balancing precariously on the railing, all while screaming into the mic.
The set ended with “Psychic Attack,” one of the top tracks from “MG Ultra.”
Later returning for an encore, Stephenson pulled out another “MG Ultra” track, “Cicadas,” and — one of my all-time favorites — “Scroll of Sorrow,” from the 2020 album “U-Void Synthesizer.”
By the end of the show, we were all run ragged. I’d lost a bracelet, several of my friends had been cut up (presumably by studs and spikes) in the pit and we all dreamed desperately of cool air and bottled water.
Composed of cigarette smoke sighs and technicolor lights flashing across the lenses of sunglasses, the music of French Police is jaunty and moody — disaffected and brimming with emotion, slow-moving and riveting — a wine-smooth melange of perfectly married contradictions.
I’ve loved them since “Clock Man” and “Club De Vampiros” first crossed my path, and jumped at the opportunity to see them live — finally, I might add, after watching them tour the west coast for years — in Carrboro.
Cover for “Pedaleo Nocturno” by French Police
The Show
The venue was awash in showgoers clad in the stylistics of 2014 Tumblr: leather jackets over tight black pants or stockings, feet clad in shiny black boots and dark hair scalded with a flat iron.
A tang of cigarettes and clove cologne was thick on the air. Part of me wondered if I’d accidentally wandered into an Arctic Monkeys gig. Then I spotted it: a merch table decked out with a pair of women’s underwear, the words “FRENCH POLICE” emblazoned across the backside. That’s when I knew I was in the right place.
Cover for “BULLY” by French Police
I attempted to take a photo of the crowd for posterity’s sake, but their clothing rendered them something of a shapeless mass. Maybe it was better that way. When French Police took the stage — dressed all in black, eyes concealed by moody shades — the audience became a dusky, rolling sea.
Exuberant beats, thrumming basslines and the breathy vocals of Brian Flores transformed the backroom into a vivid musical space.
The audience swayed in unison, excitement and jubilation spilling over into cheers as the band flowed through all of our favorite songs, devil-may-care, strutting languid across the stage. It was dreamlike, soaking in the sonorous beats of one of my favorite bands, watching them live and breathe just feet away.
It was a sweet show. Nothing crazy, just pure adoration. And sometimes that’s all you need.
For nearly three years, he’s been a veritable ghost within the music scene, spending his time on an “eat-pray-love” adjacent journey stretching from Europe to Thailand following a nearly career-ending injury while touring with Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Festival.
Sturgill Simpson may have taken his bow, but Johnny Blue Skies follows strongly in his wake.
Hopscotch started early at the Rialto with a little help from power-pop darlings The dB’s and singer-songwriter, Kate Rhudy on Wednesday Sept. 4, 2024
What’s a better way to kick off our beloved festival days than with a meeting of old and new NC music at a tried-and-true old venue turned new?
For the uninitiated, The dB’s are an NYC power-pop quartet by way of Winston-Salem.
Guitarist and vocalist Chris Stamey was the first member to fly the Southern coop to NYU, making a name for himself as a member of Alex Chilton’s backing band “The Kossacks,” later persuading bassist Gene Holder and drummer Will Rigby to join him.
It wasn’t until Chapel Hill based band H-Bomb fizzled out in 1978 that the soon-to-be dB’s lineup would be complete with the addition of guitarist and vocalist Peter Holsapple.
A prime example of “your favorite band’s favorite band,” The dB’s saw rave critical reviews but never quite broke the mainstream in the same way their Southern college rock pioneering contemporaries did.
They easily could have and should have been apart of that massive boom, marching across college campuses arm in arm with R.E.M.
With the imminent reissue of their 1981 debut album “Stands for Decibels” on the horizon, their warm-up set was a celebration of the band’s multifaceted sound an more importantly their
Encompassing both Stamey’s nebulous and amorphous Beach-Boys-by-way-of-Big-Star baroque style pop and Holsapple’s straightforward, youthfully sneering guitar rock, their set was an effective love letter to not only their beginning but to the fans who have stuck with them through the years, and those who have joined along the way.
Kate Rhudy at The Rialto, September 4th 2024 – Photo by Emma Bookhardt
Supported by Kate Rhudy, the Raleigh-based singer-songwriter warmed the theater with an intimate and tender 45-or so minute set.
Tried and true coffeeshop acoustic, Rhudy cut an incredibly charming if not a little green figure on stage in her rhinestone go-go boots.
Standing alone with her guitar, she carried an air of vulnerability as she crooned and flipped her way through breakup songs and love letters to missing cats.
With each quasi-yodel and delicate vocal flips, she garnered easy comparisons to 10,000 Maniacs’ Natalie Merchant and Taylor Swift.
Perhaps a more direct line of comparison would be if a young Merchant managed Swift’s songbook.
Melding with what seems to be the over all ethos of the festival, Rhudy felt comfortably familiar to old favorites we know and love, while still keeping a unique image all her own.
Alternatively, The dB’s felt as fresh as they day they emerged from NYC’s basement clubs, now serving as a musical “Guess Who?” between their influences and the later influenced.
In contemporary terms, you wouldn’t have groups like The Lemon Twigs without The dB’s, nor would I hazard to guess one of Jack White’s many projects, The Raconteurs.
But that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it?
Remembering why we love our favorite bands and finding something new to fawn over at the same time; a celebration of music’s circularity.
Together, The dB’s and Rhudy brought a show together for a an intimate welcome to the festival weekend and it certainly left me wanting more of the Hopscotch soup du jour.
Jane says the unthinkable has happened, and by some 90s-alt-rock-infused miracle – Jane Addiction has reunited and taken their madcap rock to Raleigh’s Red Hat Amphitheatre.
Formed in 1985 by Perry Farrell, Dave Navarro, Stephen Perkins and Eric Avery, Jane’s Addiction quickly rode the wave of L.A. rock with a mélange of punk ideologies, arthouse theatrics and the mad dog rabid funk-fusion of bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers—though I would attest that Farrell and his motley crew did it bigger, better and meaner than RHCP ever could dream of.
However, from an outsider looking in, it is nigh short of a miracle that all four original members made it through the 90s and into a space that would welcome a reunion.
Not to say they were a flash in the pan, but they certainly weren’t a band that foretold longevity; they were hard-living men, and hard-living men seldom long for this world.
Yet, here we are in 2024, and by some strange turn of events, the original lineup has taken to the stage once more.
In a co-headlined tour of North America, Jane’s Addiction and Love and Rockets launched a dual-ended attack on our alt-rock sensibilities.
And what a night of dualities it was.
Starting strong, Love and Rockets were everything you want to see out of a New Wave act: sparkly suits, thinned hair teased to high heavens, droning guitars, heavy synths and a voice that inexplicably has not aged.
Following a lackluster opening act, Daniel Ash and co. came out swinging with “The Light,” cranking up the synth lines in something more reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails rather than the radio-friendly Bauhaus off-shoot.
The band shot from one song to the next with little intermission or crowd-friendly banter in a blistering fuzzy wave of guitar-driven rock that spanned their discography.
“Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven” album cover (1985)“Express” album cover (1986)“Earth Sun Moon” album cover (1987)
They were good, but dare I say they were almost too good; by the time they closed out their set with a rollicking, raucous rendition of “Yin and Yang (The Flowerpot Man),” I didn’t just want more, I was hungry for more – but you can have too much of a good thing.
Now, I respect their art and I commend their work to stay fit for the stage. However, I can’t help but miss the grit and mess that rock used to come with.
And then Perry Farrell bounded onto the stage…
In Defense of the Rock Star
Before I even bought my tickets for the tour, I had heard mixed reviews about how the reunited band performed together on stage, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled.
Rumors and shaky cellphone footage of slurred words and drunken ramblings filled my feed whenever I looked for anything about the show, and that’s not something I can pass up in good conscience.
Let me tell you, that good conscience paid off in spades.
At a minimum, the setlist was everything you need to hear from a Jane’s Addiction show: a nearly even split between tracks off of “Nothing’s Shocking,” “Ritual de lo Habitual,” and a stray few across their relatively small discography.
“Nothing’s Shocking” album cover (1988)“Ritual de lo Habitual” album cover (1990)
Navarro, Avery and Perkins were unrelenting in their sonic assault, driving the set forward so powerfully your seat would vibrate beneath you. There were moments in the set when I felt it so strongly that I had to sit back to get my bearings.
When I say it was heavy, it was heavy.
But it was also so incredibly, wonderfully, beautifully messy in the same breath.
Above, I wrote “Perry Farrell bounded onto the stage…” when in reality, it was somewhere between a stagger and a slink as he whined his way through the opening lines of “Kettle Whistle.”
To be fair, Farrell is a lot like Rod Stewart in a way because we all know that it’s not technically a “good” voice, but an interesting one, and interesting ones hardly stand the test of time.
He’s not a man who knows how to sing; he’s a guy who figured out he sounded halfway cool screeching into a mic, and it worked.
Long story short, the voice didn’t quite hold up over the years, but it was never going to – the writing was on the wall all along.
Speaking of “writing on the wall,” addiction haunted the band since its 1985 inception, far beyond name-only
Anyone who cut their teeth on the Sunset Strip is more often than not inclined to taste the hard stuff – Farrell’s poison of choice were speedballs: go big or go home.
All that is to say, anyone who bought tickets expecting a nice, clean, presentable act came to the wrong show.
As the night wore on, it was plain to see that something on stage was wrong; something or rather someone, wasn’t on the same page as the rest of the band.
While the instrumentally inclined members of the band laid down what I can only describe as sonic bedrock comparable to Led Zeppelin, their charismatic frontman slurred his way through song after song, somehow managing to stay just a hare off beat every single time.
And I loved every single minute of it.
Culturally, we’ve come to a point where rock isn’t big and bad any more.
There’s nothing to warn your children about or straighten your mother’s curls…guys in polos are going to gigs.
At what point did we defang rock’n’roll?
Was it when the Eagles crooned their country-fied California easy listening over the air waves?
Or maybe when your favorite band became a “sellout?”
Either way you want to spin it, we all have our own “whys” as to the mass acceptance of rock as a genre.
But sometimes, you need a reminder that a lion in the winter is still a lion; an aging rockstar is still a goddamn rockstar.
From often incoherent stories sandwiched between fumbled and unintelligible lyrics to joining the pit for a smoke (true story), Jane’s Addiction, but more specifically, Perry Farrell revived the long extinct archetype.
Despite being under the influence, he owned that stage and that crowd; I’ve hardly ever heard more voices in unison than when the band broke into a tenderhearted, surprisingly gentle acoustic rendition of “Jane Says” in the middle of the debauched and flamboyant set.
So yes, to the man in Brooks Brothers beside me – I’m sorry it didn’t quite live up to your thirty-something-year-old memories (though I would argue: If you saw Jane’s Addiction in their heyday, you might not have been so lucid yourself).
But, sometimes, the old gods need to step down off their mountain and remind us of how things used to be; sobriety be damned.
We’re witnessing the musical changing of the guard and it could not be a more excitingly bittersweet time to love music.
The 2024 line-up for the Outlaw Music Festival was nothing short of legendary rolling into Raleigh’s Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek; Celisse, Alisson Krause & Robert Plant, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson all taking the stage.
But as best laid plans are apt to do, the line up fell through.
The danger, you see, is in relying on octo- and nonagenarians for your entertainment is the general precarity of old age.
Friday, June 21st Willie Nelson’s team released a statement announcing the country singer’s departure from four of the ensuing tour dates due to medical concerns.
In his place, son Lukas Nelson and the Nelson Family Band stepped in with an abridged tribute set.
But it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing to let the younger Nelson take the stage in his father’s wake.
If anything, it reaffirmed what we already knew about Willie’s songs — they’re timeless country-western staples for a reason.
And more importantly, Lukas Nelson is far too talented to stay in his father’s shadow.
Freed from the albatross of an elderly father, Nelson’s voice quite literally soared through the shortened tribute set – simply put, he sounded like his father for a new age.
Waffling between original compositions and Willie-standards, Nelson was able to effortlessly bridge the divide between new fans and old, bouncing between the soulful growl present on Promise of The Real track “Find Yourself” to his father’s signature warble on songs like “Blue Eyes Crying In the Rain.”
Speaking of soul, I would be remiss not to mention one of the freshest faces amongst the lineup: Celisse.
The Oakland born singer and guitarist easily won over unsure and unfamiliar audiences with more than just sweet talk and charm, she won them over with her sound.
Bombastic in every sense of the word, her belt and her shred equally silenced the normally rowdy “lawnies” of Coastal Credit Union – her cover of Bill Withers’ “Use Me” met with earthshaking applause and shouts.
For a woman who has been making music for well over a decade, touring as supporting acts for some of the biggest acts in folk and easy listening rock both old and new – Brandi Carlisle and Joni Mitchell, to name a few – I have a sneaking suspicion that Outlaw Music Festival is only the beginning of her just desserts.
So yes, Bob Dylan and Robert Plant were once-in-a-lifetime, bucket list artists to see, but perhaps more importantly, I walked away with not just hope, but a feverish excitement to see what the next wave of Americana, Soul and whatever-the-hell-else-you-want-to-call-it will be.
Long story short, it is sad to see the old god’s fade away, but my god, I cannot wait to see the nebulous eruptions of the new.
From Brittany’s slightly dubious tell all to an ill-fated romp in the Hamptons, he’s has had a tough go of it as of late.
And my, what a sight to see.
Celebrity implosions, especially of such long standing figures, are always a spectacle – but I’ve yet to see one that reeks of desperation quite like Timberlake’s.
From the hallowed halls of the Mickey Mouse Club to Gen X thirst trap World Tours, Timberlake has a knack for keeping himself in the spotlight.
For better or worse, the common man has a half-baked notion of what — or rather, who — he is.
But there’s something that feels different about this latest scandal.
Perhaps it’s because I had the pleasure of seeing him at PNC Arena a week before his DUI.
Or maybe it’s the comical coverage of the incident — considering the pouty celebrity mugshot, perp walk and the beautifully oblivious cop making the arrest.
Either way you spin it, there’s something distinctly and pitifully funny about Timberlake’s snafu.
Rockstars and rappers go through their own legal issues and brushes with the law, but when it happens to a pop star, people pay attention.
Even more so to someone of Timberlake’s caliber.
For people 35 and over, he’s been a tried and true standard for a large part of American pop-culture.
From childhood to adulthood, he’s been a prominent spotlight feature, and he’s desperately grasping at the edge of the stage as he’s being played out.
As far as the soundscape of popular culture goes, he’s by and far left behind.
His stage show proves it to, sadly: asses really only left seats for old standards like “Sexy Back,” “Suit and Tie” and “Cry Me A River” — even more so for the throwback reliant DJ opener.
Not to besmirch the opening band, but there’s something wrong with your act if more people are amped for a DJ playing the dancehall classics of yesterday than your set.
Consistently, he’s released albums every four to five years since 2002. Yet, his sound hardly changes.
Since he’s left NSYNC, the only evolution I can truly see is a semi-annual media scandal of either infidelity or inebriation.
When your entire career is based upon the affection of young girls, what happens when those girls grow up?
What happens when you grow up?
Somewhere within the pandering, paltry pastiche of the “Forget Tomorrow” world tour and the relatively tame release “Everything I Thought I Was,” you’ll find the answer.
It was a good show, don’t get me wrong.
Justin Timberlake is an entertainer first and foremost, to which he most certainly delivered.
But as the times catch up with the now 43-year old, fading pop star, the whirling dervish of past and present controversy seems to loom large over him.
From Britney to Janet, inebriation, infidelity and unknown world tours, perhaps Timberlake should take to the mirror himself and truly reckon with his next steps.
Because let’s be fair, humoring an aging audience in flights of fantasy feels like a desperate cash-grab preying on the hardwired need of women past a certain age to feel relevant — to feel important.
In a world where artists are more accessible than ever, feeling more real than ever, the thin line between artifice and artistry has never been more apparent.
And artists who are unwilling to step beyond their predestined imagery are not only doing their audiences a disservice, they are doing one to themselves.
The official “Mirrors” music video from Justin Timberlake’s official YouTube Vevo page.
Quasi burst onto stage amidst a flurry of bird sounds, with bandmates and former spouses Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss taking places behind their respective instruments, huge grins on their faces.
Bryan Garris of Knocked Loose. Original Photo by David Barnas
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/
On June 7, 2024, Knocked Loose played at The Ritz in Raleigh for their tour promoting their new album, “You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To.” The metalcore band hailing from Kentucky has properly solidified itself over the past half-decade within the hardcore hall of fame. With their brutal riffs, poetically miserable writing and satisfying band synergy that beckons stadium-spanning mosh pits, Knocked Loose is truly a force to be reckoned with.
Wilco Performing at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh
I first heard of Wilco when I was about fifteen years old.
At this age, I was meeting with a weekly writing workshop to share our own work and discuss the work of those we admired. We would print out poems and short stories to pour over and pick apart. Our small group was led by the local author Frances O’Roark Dowell, who still to this day provides me with a fountain of wisdom and inspiration.
One summer day, Frances brought the lyrics from Wilco’s “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.” She handed out the printed sheets of paper and we took a moment to read.
