Jazzy, festive, punk

Back to the ’90s: It was a blast from Sacramento’s past last Friday at Harlow’s with a one-night return of local jazz-pop-funk-reggae-alternative duo Papa’s Culture. The group used to play all over town in the ’90s and scored a deal on Elektra, which garnered a lot of critical acclaim but only modest sales. Of course, it’s amazing to think that they ever scored that deal and were marketed to an alternative audience in 1993 considering their heavy jazz influences. This was the era of grunge.

There were no big emotional speeches at the show explaining why E. Blake Davis and Harley White Jr. decided to throw this reunion, but they were obviously happy to be on stage. The musicianship was incredible, tight and energetic, and the songs seem much more mature and steeped in soul than their original 1993 versions, which would occasionally dip into quirky They Might Be Giants and hip-hop territory.

The two songs to garner the biggest responses were the offbeat “Muffin Man,” which they introduced as a singalong, and of course the tune that was the closest thing they had to a hit single, the breezy-jazzy “Swim,” which closed with an extended, percussive break that built up to a lively funk jam.

—Aaron Carnes

Porch party: Watching Be Brave Bold Robot perform on a sidewalk with more than a hundred fellow onlookers—and feet dangling from the roof above—felt like a simultaneously special and completely normal Midtown Sacramento experience. It’s a wonder Sac PorchFest didn’t happen sooner.

Last Saturday, three Midtown homes transformed their porches into stages for an all-afternoon house-hop of a music festival. It was free, and the all-ages crowd was over-the-top enthusiastic, hootin’ and hollerin’ louder than at any local show I’ve been to in recent memory. The lineup—Sammie Artist of the Year Joseph in the Well, an amazing four-piece jazz ensemble from the Sacramento Philharmonic & Opera and bluegrass string band One Button Suit among them—proved perfectly fitting for the relaxed yet proud vibe.

Full disclosure: I live at the Eye Street Co-op, which was one of the porches at the festival, but I was not involved in any of the fest’s planning or execution. So this is a relatively unbiased write-up, unlike VICE Thump’s review of TBD Fest, which was presented by Thump.

In any case, what matters is that the PorchFest crowd was ecstatic. If anything, people were smiling too hard, wiggling their shoulders too joyfully. Best of all, by the end, so many were just neighbors enjoying their right to public spaces—people who just happened to walk by and stick around.

—Janelle Bitker

‘Gender is over’: When Cayetana took the stage last week, the Philly trio held no pretenses about its spot on the bill. The floor at Ace of Spades remained largely bare.

“We’re going to play some songs you’ve probably never heard,” singer-songwriter Augusta Koch told the audience, the majority of whom had likely migrated to the stage early to snag a prime spot for headliner Against Me!

No worries, by set’s end the band had earned at least a few new fans with its angsty mix of ’80s college rock, ’90s-era riot grrrl and millennial punk. The band played much of its 2014 album Nervous Like Me but also debuted two new songs, both darker and dirgier than the older songs. The perpetually blue-haired Koch proved to be a charismatic draw, belting out a tortured squeak of heartbreak and nostalgia as she sang about moving out of an ex’s, watching a friend try to get clean and childhood summers.

By the time Florida punk band Against Me! hit the stage, the club was nearly packed with a mix of aging, aggro punks and younger fans in agreement with the slogan on Laura Jane Grace’s T-shirt: “Gender is over.” Whatever the reason for being there, everyone in the room seemed to come alive on the band’s timeless energy, moshing, thrashing and singing along to their breakneck anthemic punk—the band whipped through five songs in just about 10 minutes. Clearly the more some people change, the more some bands thankfully stay the same.

—Rachel Leibrock