[ATTENDED: October 9, 2021] highnoon
Philly Music Fest started in 2017. I went to a show in 2019–a great line up! Last year was online only, but this year it was back. The lineup was different and wonderful. And, thankfully, the two bands I wanted to see most were on the same bill.
I hadn’t heard of highnoon. Artist Kennedy Freeman launched Highnoon in 2019. Now Highnoon is led by Kennedy Freeman with longtime collaborator, Justin Roth on drums, Brendan Simpson on guitar, and Nathan Avila on bass.
I listened to their music and found it pretty and quiet. Their new EP, Divers is their first body of work since their debut record, Semi Sweet.
I wasn’t expecting a pretty rocking set from this seemingly quiet foursome. Actually, singer Freeman maintained a pretty quiet level throughout, but she was counterbalanced by some pretty wild guitar shredding from Simpson. I took some really cool videos of Simpson’s playing, but at this time, Instagram decided that it would no longer allow me to move my video up or down to get the main part of the video into focus.
And since I didn’t want to post videos of only people’s heads or of people with no heads, I didn’t post any from this set. Which is a shame.
I didn’t know the names of any songs, although I suspect a bunch came form their two EPs. The one song I did know was their cover of “Yellow” by Coldplay–a rather leftfield cover I thought, but really solid. Kennedy played mostly slow chords and she had a pretty soft and gentle voice. But the band did rock out from time to time and Brendan Simpson was a madman on guitars. Great soloing and some classic rocking poses.
They were a great warm up act.
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