This past Wednesday, November 22nd, a leather-clad Liz Phair gave Gen Xers the perfect pre-Thanksgiving emotional cleanse with a performance of her seminal ’93 debut, Exile in Guyville, as part of the album’s 30th anniversary tour. The “legendary albums” performance had the now-56-year-old Phair performing the lo-fi masterpiece at Franklin Music Hall, her first stop at the venue since its renaming, having last played the room in 2004, while touring her controversially approachable (yet still great) 2003 self-titled LP, whose lead single, “Why Can’t I?” closed Wednesday night’s set.
However, Partisan Records recording artist Blondshell provided an opening set of youthful angst that was just as engaging, and technically “fresher” (Not that Guyville has aged much at all…) Blondshell began in 2020, when Sabrina Teitelbaum tired of the alt-pop she was churning out under the moniker of BAUM, and instead decided to focus on the kinds of alt-rock Phair has helped to make “classic.” Teitelbaum has cited Kathleen, Courtney, and Polly Jean as major inspirations, and even put out a cover The Cranberries’ “Disappointment” this March (prior to Blondshell’s self-titled debut LP, which dropped in April), which we actually first heard this January at Union Transfer…
Wednesday night’s set at Franklin Music Hall was actually Blondshell’s fifth appearance in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection this year… Her first had her opening for Suki Waterhouse at a sold-out UT, where a notable number of fans already knew the words to early singles “Kiss City,” “Sepsis,” and “Veronica Mars,” before playing both a NON-Comm set and Free At Noon set at World Café Live, the FAN being the afternoon of a sold-out headlining show a PhilaMOCA (featuring our friends Hello Mary as openers).
Blondshell’s forty-minute opening set featured the majority of tracks from their full-length, a few standalone singles, a brand-new song, and their admirably gutsy take on Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon” (Kathleen found herself on the very same stage in April with Bikini Kill, and in May performed the song with recently reunited Le Tigre just down the street.), which was disappointingly unfamiliar to the majority of the audience. The set’s biggest highlights came early on, with those early singles, such as this decade’s greatest homage to the aughts, “Veronica Mars,” which started things off, and “Sepsis,” whose breakdown features the lyrics, “He wears a front-facing cap // The sex is almost always bad // I don’t care ’cause I’m in love // I don’t know him well enough,” which has been stuck in my head since it dropped last October…
Teitelbaum’s stage presence — which features the charmingly flippant abandon found in the greatest headliners of Lollapalooza – took the cake as the performance of the night, and she proved that Blondshell have a live show that can fill a 2,500-capacity factory… And the now-grown Gen Xers did seem to appreciate that cool young people are still making noises that are familiar to them, although it’s unclear if Blondshell is someone that they plan to keep up with, or perhaps may just suggest to their kids, in hopes that they don’t take up this generation’s version of the pop music they so profoundly feared 30 years ago.
