Sour Widows • Dusk • Gash • DJ Liz E McGuire

Wed 07/23/25

7:00PM

All Ages

music

$18 ADV // $20 DOS

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Sour Widows

(San Francisco, CA)

Genre: Indie Rock

Maia Sinaiko and Susanna Thomson like to joke that they are delusional about Sour Widows, the Bay Area band they started eight years ago; in those eight years, Sinaiko and Thomson each endured losses and hardships that at times required putting bigger plans on hold; looking back, they can only laugh at these hurdles and wonder if they should have taken them as signs—to stop, to start over, to succumb to the hardship.

Absolutely not: Sour Widows has served as an essential outlet for Sinaiko and Thomson, a way to process real-time woes so as to transmute them into something beautiful, useful, real, and lasting. It has been an anchor, too, keeping them lashed to reality as the world roiled around them. ‘Revival of a Friend’ is their collective testament to that process, an hour-long lesson in endurance that is years in the making. Inspired by the folk singing of their youth, the grit and grace of Joni Mitchell, the slowly spiraling dazzle of Duster, and the steady angularity and sudden snarl of Slint, ‘Revival of a Friend’ fully recognizes the arbitrary cruelty of individual existence and finds that some of the best ways beyond it are to share harmonies, a tangle of electric guitars, or a song that simply imagines hope somewhere on the other side. Methodically built over many years with longtime friend and trusted drummer Max Edelman, this is a poignant and gripping record about the pain of growing up and getting on with it.

However pervasive it is, grief is not the only takeaway from the album. Sinaiko and Thomson are still here, after all, in a great DIY rock band that is a gathering of best friends, having made a mighty record that encapsulates and so sublimates all this anguish. It feels especially relevant that it emerges as a work of friendship from the Bay Area, dominated in recent years not by stories of the arts but instead by technology and the inequality it has wrought there. ‘Revival of a Friend’ is rooted in personal hurts, but it feels like an invitation to band together and work through our pains as one, to share the burdens of the world until we can find a better way forward. This is not delusion; this is hope, as difficult and necessary now as ever.

Dusk

(Appleton, WI)

Genre: Americana

Dusk is a group that walks the shadowed path. It’s well known in the rural pastures of Wisconsin, where all of the members of this group were raised, that the traditional music of the common people is Polka, but the most respected form of musical expression is Country and Western. Dusk walks cleanly between these two worlds; pulling influence from both but most strongly associating with Rock & Roll and Rhythm & Blues. They bring with them a strong, informed, melodic statement that draws a line between themselves and the trend of bubble gum pop and country-influenced mall schlock.

The group consists of vocalist Julia Blair on Wurlitzer electric piano, Colin “Wild Man” Wilde on drums and percussion, Amos Pitsch on bass guitar and vocals, Tyler Ditter on lead guitar, and Ryley Crowe on rhythm guitar, pedal steel, and vocals. Amos also doubles as a member of Appleton, Wisconsin punk band Tenement. The group is often compared to 60’s garage and R&B groups like NRBQ and THE LOVIN SPOONFUL, early 70’s country rock pioneers THE FLYING BURRITO BROTHERS, and at times the primitive rock and roll sound of a group like THE VELVET UNDERGROUND.

They hint at all these things, even as something in their music seems to breathe modern air. It’s a feeling that few musicians that attempt to nod to prior generations can capture without bastardising the very music that they intended to salute. Dusk have done it well, and in their music, you’ll find this plain truth among many exciting secrets.