Priests at Deep South at the Hopscotch Music Festival in Raleigh, NC
As a general rule music festivals give a pretty poor representation of a particular city’s music climate and, as such, no real sense as to how that city might receive a band or group of bands. Marquee acts like Spoon and De La Soul are going to do well at festivals regardless of the whether crowds in say, “Chicago!” indeed hail from Chicago. Yet, Raleigh, N.C.’sHopscotch Music Festival is unlike most music festivals. Whether that’s due to the big names that play the city plaza or the heavy focus on experimental music (Thurston Moore was this year’s improviser-in-residence), Hopscotch draws people from anywhere within a seven-hour radius. Still, there’s a strong local focus and a large percentage of the crowd drove, at most, thirty minutes catch showcases.
What’s more, is that the festival is still small enough so that unlike, say, CMJ or SXSW, there’s no more than five bands playing opposite each other at any given time. Thus, this year’s Hopscotch Festival provided perhaps a more accurate picture of D.C. bands’ reception outside of the D.C./Baltimore the comfort zone.
Five D.C. bands made their way down to Raleigh last weekend, and, overall, made a impressive mark on the venerable music festival, once more proving that the local scene is continually making bigger waves in other parts of the country. Things kicked off Thursday night with a set from ubiquitous psych-rock quartet Paperhaus. If Paperhaus isn’t the hardest working band in D.C. right now, then they’re certainly in the top three. Along with booking touring bands all over country to play D.C. (often at their own house), the band actually hits the road on a semi-regular basis. They played to a packed crowd in the cramped, narrow Bee Hive, who were eagerly waiting to—if not see them—at least hear their music.
Of course, it may not have hurt that their latest single “Cairo” (which has received love from the likes of Stereogum and NME) is an immediately engaging psychedelic number that injects the listener with a sense of bliss before ending powerfully on a high energy guitar freakout. It’s easily the best song the band has ever written. Before ending on that decidedly high note, they took a crowd request for the bluesy ballad “Misery,” proving that they’d made some kind of an impression in North Carolina before the mainstream press caught wind.
Paperhaus at the Bee Hive at the Hopscotch Music Festival in Raleigh, NC
Although Paperhaus is in the middle of a tour, which culminates, which with a single release show at Comet Ping Pong on Saturday, they fully utilized their time at the festival to watch other bands. Hopscotch Music Festival is filled with vaguely familiar-sounding regional names, but there was a 25 percent chance that Paperhaus had either toured with, or previously booked them at their DIY house venue in Petworth.
In fact, it was due to their omnipresence, that we found out local dream-pop duo GEMS (who, sadly, we missed) also played a solid show to a packed and receptive crowd during their official set. Their 2013 EP, Medusa, has gotten some love from national press outlets and GEMS was one of the only D.C. bands to hit SXSW this past year, but neither of those things are necessarily guarantors of an audience.
Meanwhile, across the city in an off-the-beaten-path club called Deep South—where quotes from such lyrical luminaries as Great White and 311 covered the walls—incendiary surf rock-meets-hardcore band Priests proved that they deserved their headlining spot. Not only are they one of D.C.’s most beloved and frequently touring bands in recent years, but they’re critical darlings of national outlets, too, receiving high praise from publications like SPIN and Pitchfork. “We know you had a lot of choices tonight,” singer Katie Alice Greer quipped from the stage, “Congratulations, you picked the right one.” And the crowd really believed it: there was a lot of bouncing bodies (though not a full-formed mosh pit) near the front of the stage for most of their set and they took the crowd’s incessant begging for one more song, playing it on top of their planned set (read: not an encore) before they left the stage. Their merch booth also had one of the festival’s longer post-show lines.
Still, there were pockets of unfortunate negativity though: one fan reported that she had a hard time enjoying the first third of the set with a gentleman behind her spouting uncomfortable and misogynistic epithets about what he’d like to do to Greer. Apparently, Raleigh, for all its charm, is not devoid of Those Misogynistic Jerks.
Ex Hex at the Babes in Boyland Party/Girls Rock Benefit in the Warehouse District at the Hopscotch Music Festival in Raleigh, NC
Here’s the spoiler alert that will surprise nobody: Ex Hex’s upcoming release Rips does precisely that and will, upon its release, overtake the newest effort by The New Pornographers (which is also good) as the feel good album of the fall. As such, it was noticeable that Ex Hex got off to a slow start. They opened with the unfailingly catchy single “Don’t Wanna Lose,” but for whatever reason, it didn’t quite pack the full gut punch of adrenaline that it does on record. They gained momentum within three songs when they started to have fun with each other onstage. Mary Timony can drop more jaws with her guitar tone than most recording musicians, but it really became a show when she and bassist Betsy Wright playfully tried to out-swagger the other with raised guitars and high kicks. We also spotted Merge Records co-founder and Superchunk bassist Laura Ballance bouncing around on the side of the stage with a mile-wide smile on her face.
Really, the only band that didn’t seem to get the crowd that they deserved was hazy, low-key three-piece The Caribbean, who played opposite Ex Hex in a small club down the street. To be fair, upon telling other people that they were on our concert agenda, the most common response wasn’t “Who’s The Caribbean” it was, “Wait…they’re here?” The Caribbean has had a cult following nationwide for over a decade and the idea of hearing beautifully soothing-yet-complex tunes like “Imitation Air” in a mercifully cool and dark room would be the ideal respite from Raleigh’s late-afternoon heat and humidity. Yet somehow, the word did not get out.
