Alvvays dazzle in their return to Washington DC
Every good fan has a story about how they saw a band before they blew up. It’s not quite before they got big, but here’s mine: I caught Alvvays when they played at the now-defunct Rock and Roll Hotel in Washington DC in October of 2017. At the ripe old age of 19, I saw the Canadian indie pop heroes burn through all the best songs from their first two albums, Alvvays and Antisocialites.
The Rock and Roll Hotel was not nearly as nice or majestic as the name makes it sound. To put it plainly, it was a dump. Super narrow and poorly ventilated, the venue was nevertheless a necessary middle ground between the 250-person capacity DC9 (which Alvvays played in 2014) and the roughly 1,000-person capacity of The Black Cat. It was big enough to be a real club for a professional touring act, but you still had to get your merch at a table on the second floor while the band played on the ground floor.
Luckily, Alvvays didn’t have to worry about any of those places this time around. With the release of this year’s excellent Blue Rev, Alvvays have graduated to DC’s most legendary venue, The 9:30 Club. Admittedly, it’s not the original 9:30 Club that housed legendary shows by the likes of Fugazi and Trouble Funk – this is the brighter, shinier, newer, and much nicer 9:30 Club that opened in 1996. Still, same owners, same name, and same legendary status.
It’s the perfect room for a band like Alvvays, who need the proper amount of open space to allow their echoing guitar lines and shoegaze-adjacent sound to bounce off the walls properly. Stuffed to the gills with fans who haven’t been able to see the group in nearly half a decade, it’s safe to say that there were some high expectations for Alvvays when they stepped onstage.
You wouldn’t have been able to tell, however. With the calm assuredness who was as comfortable as they’ve ever been in their own skin, Alvvays blasted through 20 songs of pure indie pop bliss that left audience goers delirious. Kicking off with their Blue Rev comeback single ‘Pharmacist’, the band barely took any time to stop and breathe before immediately kicking into another track.
This being a late show, the band didn’t actually make it onto the stage until around 11:30. Most bands would take that as a good excuse to cut down their show and head to bed. Not Alvvays. Even as they were getting into double-digit song counts, there was no slowing down or hesitation to give the ravenous audience exactly what they had been waiting all night to hear. No one, not in the band or in the audience, seemed at all remotely tired.
Each time Alvvays have come to DC, there’s been a slightly different lineup. At the Rock and Roll Hotel, drummer Sheridan Riley was the new addition. This time around, it was bassist Abbey Blackwell. Neither one seemed phased by the larger venue – in fact, Riley could barely contain her excitement blasting through high-energy stompers like ‘Adult Diversion’ and ‘Hey’. Blackwell was the unflappable anchor, flashing a smile every time it was clear that the group were hitting their stride.
On the front lines were the three band stalwarts: keyboardist Kerri MacLellan, guitarist Alec O’Hanley, and guitarist/singer Molly Rankin. Thanks to the Blue Rev material, MacLellan had a lot more sonic territory to cover with her keyboards. Songs like ‘After the Earthquake’ and ‘Easy On Your Own’ were boosted by MacLellan’s textures, even if she wasn’t quite as loud in the mix as she probably should have been.
Most of the high-end mix went to O’Hanley, the ever-steady hand who can pick out arpeggios, blast out fuzzy solos, and even cover some additional keyboard parts when called upon. O’Hanley would have made the namesake of ‘Tom Verlaine’ proud, bringing a few more jagged edges to his more polished playing style. Throughout songs like ‘Dreams Tonite’ and ‘Atop A Cake’, O’Hanley could be seen hammering away on his vibrato arm to add the proper amount of waviness to the proceedings.
As for Rankin, she was in pristine form. Blue Rev showed off a slightly different vocal style than the one that fans had come to expect from the singer, but in the live setting, Rankin had no trouble switching between the higher tones of the band’s early material and the more heavily-processed sound of the modern day. Rankin commanded the stage without much flash or banter – for the most part, the songs did the talking for her.
And what a collection of songs. All three of the band’s albums saw their fair share of play, including great album cuts like ‘Not My Baby’ and ‘Party Police’. The band’s Blue Rev material sounded less wonky and more immediate live, while their old material continued to sparkle. Of course, it was nearly impossible to hear Rankin sing once the opening riff to ‘Archie, Marry Me’ kicked in. It might become the band’s albatross in later years, but here, it was stuck right in the middle of the set, almost as if it was a dare to see if anyone would leave after it was done. From what I saw, nobody did.
It just goes to show the band’s confidence in their new material that a song like ‘Lottery Noises’ would close the encore slot. Alvvays might have been on hold for a few years after Antisocialites, but there was no rust or hesitation to be found once they took the stage. Now with three albums of top-shelf material, Alvvays can take control of a full two-hour concert and expect fans to holler every single lyric right back at them. At their 9:30 Club show, that’s exactly what happened, and the excitement in the air was unmistakable.
Alvvays, 9:30 Club, Washington DC, November 11th, 2022:
- ‘Pharmacist’
- ‘After the Earthquake’
- ‘In Undertow’
- ‘Many Mirrors’
- ‘Very Online Guy’
- ‘Adult Diversion’
- ‘Not My Baby’
- ‘Hey’
- ‘Tom Verlaine’
- ‘Belinda Says’
- ‘Fourth Figure’
- ‘Archie, Marry Me’
- ‘Pomeranian Spinster’
- ‘Pressed’
- ‘Dreams Tonite’
- ‘Party Police’
- ‘Easy On Your Own?’
- ‘Saved by a Waif’
Encore
- ‘Atop a Cake’
- ‘Lottery Noises’
