I Just Read About That…

[ATTENDED: April 21, 2018] Gondola

I hadn’t heard of Gondola, the first of three bands this evening in The Black Box. They are a local Philly band with (apparently) a large following.  They are the first opening band I have ever seen called back for an encore.  They are also, subsequently the only band I’ve seen called back for an encore who was not allowed to play the encore because they ran out of time (apparently).

Gondola was fantastic.

They play a kind of psychedelic stoner metal, with heavy crunching guitars, awesome low end bass and some surprisingly catchy riffs.  I detected a serious 80s SST Records vibe from the sound of the guitar (solos especially) and the way the bass played off of it.

Both the guitarist Rocky Rinaldi and the bassist Jordan Blumling sang lead vocals.

And Timothy Plunkett on drums played some great fills–not a lot of snare bass, but complex tom work.

I particularly enjoyed the fuzzy sound of the bass guitar.

I’m not really sure what the songs were about, and I think that doesn’t really matter, because they were there to rock us, which the certainly did.

I felt like each song was better than the previous one.  When the Blumling sang this song (playing chords, no less) it was very cool indeed.

I enjoyed the way the songs were longish and had many parts including this very cool set ending riff.

Blumling said that most of the songs they played tonight were new ones and that they were working on recording a new album.  I’m really looking forward to it.

I talked with him briefly after the show and he said they didn’t have any psychical copies of their music but that they were on bandcamp.

He thought that maybe his mom had a copy of their first release on CD, which made us both laugh.  I really hope they can get some more exposure because they were great.

I have no idea what the set list was, but it was terrific.