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Archive for the ‘Raue’ Category

Biffy Clyro (Theatre of Living Arts [TLA], Philadelphia, PA, May 7, 2026)

Posted in Biffy Clyro, Philadelphia, PA, Raue, Theatre of Living Arts on May 8, 2026| Leave a Comment »

[ATTENDED: May 7, 2026] Biffy Clyro

Four years ago I saw Biffy Clyro at Union Transfer.  They were great.  And I couldn’t get over how back home in Scotland they typically headline festivals of thousands of people.  They recently had a film made about the: Biffy Clyro: Cultural Sons of Scotland in which they played a concert for some 50,000 people.  And yet here they were playing 1,000 person clubs.  But they put on a show as if they were playing for 50,000.  It was awesome.

They had initially announced the tour for December 2025 and there was no Philly date.  But they had visa issues:

“Some [expletive] genius put the wrong start date into our work visa, so when we received our visas in the last couple of days, we realised it doesn’t begin until after our tour is meant to finish,” he said in an Instagram video, adding: “We are so angry about this.”

But their problem is my luck because the newly scheduled dates now included a Philly show.  Whoo hoo!

Last time, they were the trio that they have always been.  But for this tour, bassist James Johnston was seeking treatment for addiction issues and wasn’t able to tour.  In his place was  Naomi Macleod, who has plays bass with Empire State Bastard, Simon Neil’s side project with Dave Lombardo–wish I had gotten to see that!  They also brought out touring guitarist Mike Vennart (who is also in ESB).

As always, the other two guys were shirtless from the get go.  I was in front of singer/guitarist Simon Neil, who puts everything he has into a live show.   His vocal cords must be totally shredded by the end of the night.  Naomi was in  the middle and her bass was excellent.  I couldn’t really see Mike that well, but it was clear when he was adding extra parts to the song (especially when one of them had an acoustic and the other had the electric). (more…)

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Raue (Theatre of Living Arts [TLA], Philadelphia, PA, May 7, 2026) [BIFFY CLYRO]

Posted in Biffy Clyro, Philadelphia, PA, Raue, Theatre of Living Arts on May 7, 2026| Leave a Comment »

[ATTENDED: May 7, 2026] Raue 

I had never heard of Raue and assumed they were a young band from Scotland that Biffy Clyro were bringing along with them.  Well, it turns out that Raue (pronounced Roo-aye [German for Rough] is a duo from California.

When they two came out on stage, literally everyone in the room had the same thought: “how old are these two?”  I mean, they couldn’t be more than 16, right?  (Paige Kalenian (guitar vocals is 21, Jax Huckle drums, is 20).  And the thing was that while we were wondering how old they were, they were blowing everybody away.

They are a duo and Paige plays some serious guitar.  The songs are simple, but it never sounds like one guitar.  Somehow she make a full sound even when fingerpicking.  But that’s nothing compared to the wild drumming that Jax does.  I was right in front of him and holy cow he blew me away.  He has incredible speed, he throws in terrific fills and he;s really creative–it’s possible they sound so huge because of all the drums that Jax is playing.

Paige is just full of energy–she jumps all around the stage when she’s not singing.  They set the two of them pretty far apart, and Paige was all over the stage, bouncing from the drums back to the mic.  And their look was amusing too–Paige with dyed purple hair and sleeveless concert T while Jax was wearing an open Oxford shirt over a white Tshirt.

I liked Paige’s voice, but the only negative about the show is that she sang similarly on all of the songs–it’s a good sound for the grungy music they play, but I think it would be better if she had more range.  Having said that, it was kind of hard to hear her in the mix, so maybe she has more diversity than I realized. (more…)

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