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.
Vylet Pony (she/it) is an artist both prolific and eclectic, her work effortlessly spanning a sometimes baffling array of genres, sounds, and themes.
For those unfamiliar with it (which is very likely), for over a decade it’s made music based on the show “My Little Pony” and its art is inextricably tied to that fandom.
Some listeners suggest this is an unfortunate self-limitation, but she clearly finds deep creative power in it, made evident by the sheer amount and quality of music she’s released over the years.
“CUTIEMARKS (And the Things That Bind Us),” released 2021, marked her first real breakthrough into a broader audience outside the MLP community.
Now its new album “Girls Who Are Wizards,” the long-awaited ‘Vylet Pony EDM Album,’ continues its intently playful musical tradition with sample-heavy, rapidly-progressing EDM tracks that never go quite where you expect them to on the first listen.
Part roleplaying game session, part transcendental heart-to-heart and part celebration of ‘cringy’ EDM, this colorful chimera of an album is a fun listening experience all the way through.
Many of Vylet Pony’s albums have a unifying sample used throughout, and “Girls Who Are Wizards’” titular first track introduces us to its own with the soundbite “The music never stops, no!”
This bright, chirpy and reverberant kickoff to the album features lots of wub, synthy strings and piano melodies accompanied by Vylet Pony’s airy vocals and emotionally evocative lyrics.
The album continues into “The Story of DJ Goober,” which I enjoyed listening to when it was released early as a single. At times heavy and at times light, this track indulges in its bass when it gets the chance and near the end builds up to an utterly satisfying drop with the help of some raw, pleading vocals.
The third track, “The Queen is Back,” carries on the heavy drops until later mellowing out into a growly beat over which Vylet raps. The end of the song has some really neat moments as it’s taken over by artificial, machinic noises.
I don’t have as much to say specifically about the album’s middle chunk, but I do like tracks 4 and 6, “The Wizard of Wubz” and “Musicians of Ponyville.” They’re all solid, but not all my style.
Skipping forwards we arrive at what’s likely my personal favorite track on the album, “Sacred Dragon.” When the second chorus hits, the layers of energy built up throughout the song are cut through by stunningly clear vocals and give way to gorgeous rolling mesas of synth. It’s a confident, hallowed, fast-moving song that definitely evokes the feeling of soaring through a story.
The penultimate track “Facing Oblivion to Become the Lode Star” is another of my favorites, calling on similar energies as “Sacred Dragon” and following the chorus with these incredible cool squeaky synths that almost sound alive. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite like them before. The song is at once relaxed and energetic, steady and out-of-the-box, personal and cinematic.
The final track is “In the Name of Friendship,” a fitting sendoff to the album and what seems like a look back on Vylet Pony’s entire creative history with bits from many of her past projects.
I interpret the lyrics as reflecting on the nature of fandom and community as a whole, both its beautiful and uglier sides (“O’ the things we’ve done/In the name/The memories soiled In the name”).
For such an indulgent and referential album, an ending that touches on these themes is perfect; the adventure the listener has gone on has now come to a close, and play winds down.
Overall, I’m still not sure how “Girls Who Are Wizards” holds up for me against classic Vylet Pony releases like the incredibly stacked “CUTIEMARKS” (the difficulty that comes from an artist consistently releasing great stuff), but it’s a very enjoyable new step with very high peaks and strong character.
I’m excited to see my feelings towards it evolve as it becomes less and less ‘new’. Whether you’re already a Vylet Pony fan or someone who’s never heard of her, I recommend checking out “Girls Who Are Wizards.”
