The clouds parted on Saturday. Not quite as dramatically as Moses parting the Red Sea, but effectively enough that late arrivals might not have felt a drop. The big blue sky revealed itself overhead, sunlight broke through and the warm rays started to steam wash the festival crowd as all the wetness sitting atop the AstroTurf began to evaporate. For the first time all weekend Boston Calling felt like a proper springtime festival.
Mon Rovîa
(Green Stage) The folky four-piece Mon Rovîa has a real personal touch. They list their P.O. Box on their Instagram bio so you can send them fan mail the old-fashioned way. They post “thank you” notes on social media to fans who have streamed their songs a lot. And they sent out vibes of tender loving care from the Green Stage. For all of that personal touch, they lacked a little personality. Their sound is folk in the style of James Taylor, radically mellow, which hits some ears just right and slides off the rest. It was almost as if a bashful folk quartet had gotten lost on the way to an open mic at a local cafe and wandered by accident onto the biggest stage in town.
Timmy Skelly
(Blue Stage) Here’s a game: Name That Genre. I’ll write down a snippet of lyrics, and you guess the genre.
“Two buck beer on a Tuesday night, sitting in the corner with my Coors Lite.”
Timmy Skelly also trotted out one of those “fill in the blanks” songs in which you fill in the name of the town you’re playing in to pander to the homegrown crowd for some cheap cheers. As cheap as those mythical Tuesday night beers, which you’re definitely not finding on the beer menu in Boston.
Pinklids
(Orange Stage) The five-piece is fronted with glam rock flair, but the meat and potatoes of Pinklids’ sound is synth-heavy hard alt rock with a few pop looper changeups mixed into the rotation. The weather was playing tricks on all of us, a light drizzle starting and stopping. A garbage bin sat in the middle of the pit for some reason and no one had the foresight or perspicacity to remove it. The press corp was queuing up in a shitty line for shitty pizza at the media tent instead of covering bands. Everything was topsy turvy, but Pinklids kept the ship on course by simply belting out the music and telling the crowd they had no reason not to dance. Which, you know, is a pretty compelling argument.
The Maine
(Green Stage) It must have been that moment in the three-day festival in which every band advises the crowd to cut loose, go for it, let their hair down because you only live once. Carpe Diem and all that. The Maine “triple dog dared” the crowd to go crazy. Does Boston need extra cajoling for hitting their high? Are we a stuffy lot? Hard to say, but it was too few adult beverages into the day for the entire crowd to oblige. As long as there is rock ’n’ roll there will be bands such as The Maine cranking out middle-of-the-road arena pop-rock that sounds like it’s been aggressively petted by the hands of 10,000 producers. Halfway through the set the life-loving frontman invited a yahoo in a cowboy hat to grunt lyrics into the microphone. Who knows, in this countrified edition of Boston Calling that yahoo might be one of the headliners.
Sidebody
(Orange Stage) Somerville’s Sidebody is always good for a bit of stagecraft. They opened with a skit in which the lead vocalist received a call on the telephone. Guess who was calling? Boston. Extra points for digging up a rotary phone – it sells the bit better in ways that are hard to explain. The band gets double billed as a musical act and a printing press collective. Add “sketch comedy group” to the CV. They played a song about new pants, titled “New Pants,” and dedicated it to the people in the crowd wearing pants. Presumably, new.
Rebuilder
(Orange Stage) The five-piece pop punkers Rebuilder have been ripping up local stages for a long time. A veteran act with about as much polish as any pop-punk outfit would reasonably require. I stumbled on a real deep cut from their discography recently, an Xmas-themed EP from 2013. It feels like a guilty pleasure in this Christo-fascist moment, but I do love a good Xmas classic cover. Originals too. I don’t think “X-mas PunX” is a standard. Rebuilder mixed things up for the Orange Stage gig with some special guests: two brass honkers from the underground marching band Magnificent Danger. When you really want to send that pop-punk sound over the top, just add brass.
Simon Robert French
(Orange Stage) Music booking is a speculative business, like the stock market or sports betting. You never know who is going to hit big, so all the smart money is looking for the one metric that guarantees good returns. There’s no such single metric, but social media impact is something that bookers look at these days. Simon Robert French has racked up millions of views on TikTok with an intimate and heartfelt brand of extreme close-up folk. Will that translate to ticket sales and meat in the seat? Interesting question. The Orange Stage at Boston Calling is not really the place to look for the answer, because the gig comes with built-in walkup traffic and is a strong draw for the “friends and family” contingent. From my vantage point, SRF needs a little more time in the oven, but I was impressed that the ensemble came at least seven strong with a fleet of folk instruments prepared to do wonderful damage.
Avril Lavigne
(Green Stage) Avril Lavigne stepped onto the Green Stage during the golden hour as a beautiful dusk light washed over the lovely masses. And she didn’t make those lovely masses wait long for a memorable hit, opening with “Girlfriend.” Once upon a time pop phenoms enjoyed their time in the sun and then did the honorable thing: shriveled up, died, disappeared. Unless you were an act like Rolling Stones or Beatles, who found ways to turn the corner from teenage heartthrob fodder to mature acts with something to say, you were left to build a life beyond the gossamer prison of being the pop culture flavor of the month. Maybe it’s a side effect of the streaming era in which bygone artists are perpetually just a playlist away. Nothing ever truly disappears. Avril Lavigne finds herself in essentially the same slot as Sheryl Crow the day before. But what critic in their right mind would hold the two in equal esteem? Crow has written decades of radio hits, drawing from a deep wellspring of country and rock and folk. Lavigne is still riding the wave of her pubescent hits. In the real world, a wave eventually breaks onto shore. But there are no rules in the forever dimension of the streaming multiverse.
The Black Crowes
(Blue Stage) The Black Crowes have still got it. The fronter that you remember with the long ’70s-style rocker tresses has cut it short in his blessed dotage. But the music is still on point. And why shouldn’t it be? The Black Crowes were never anything except the best roadhouse band you ever heard. The kind of band that The Doors were alluding to with albums such as “Morrison Hotel” (only “alluding to” because, hey, The Doors are going to Door, and they can only be themselves). Blues-based rock ages like fine wine, and the headlining set at the Blue Stage on Saturday night was a wine tasting soiree that sampled the band’s extensive roster of radio hits.
We’re in it, people. Rocketing through the halfway point of Boston Calling. At this point we have stories to tell, even if we’re not always allowed to tell them. Shout out to the pop-punk band No More Almost, straight outta Worcester. They scribbled self-adverts at the bottom of hot dog trays at the condiment tables of Boston Calling. A genius, low-cost marketing maneuver that almost makes up for the absolutely un-Google-able band name. And bands, please, stop saying your album is out on “all platforms” when you only mean that it’s out on the platforms that you paid DistroKid to release it on.
A stronger
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