Porridge Radio played Brighton Music Hall – 1/26
U.K. post-punk/art-rockers Porridge Radio played their first (and last) Boston show with support from North Carolina’s Sluice.
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March of 2020 was a pretty bad time to release a record, all things considered. Not only was the listening public, uh, moderately distracted by some other stuff, but any plans to hit the road in support of a new release were soon to evaporate for the foreseeable future. Such was the tale of Porridge Radio, whose great second LP Every Bad dropped in the middle of that cursed month and whose summer tour that year – which would’ve included a surely-classic Great Scott show – never came to fruition. Seeing a much-buzzed-about band make their local debut to a packed house at GS was one of my favorite things about that room, and I always lamented that particular cancelled gig amid the phantom concert calendar of 2020.
Porridge Radio soldiered on though, releasing two more strong records and eventually bringing their live show overseas (though not to Boston) before announcing one final EP alongside their impending breakup earlier this month. This current run of North American dates then serves as a farewell tour, complete with the odd circumstance of a hello-and-goodbye first-and-last local gig that went down over the weekend.
Brighton Music Hall on a Sunday night in January is not Great Scott in August, and Every Bad didn’t even factor into the night (I would’ve loved to hear album-opener “Born Confused,” at least), but those factors hardly diminished the fact that it was great to finally catch this band before they bow out for good. Sunday’s setlist hinged on October’s Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me, which scales back some of the group’s noisier, post-punkier tendencies in favor of slower-paced introspection and brings some of Margolin’s best songs to date with it. Flipping album closer “Sick of the Blues” to the start of the set, the current four-piece iteration broke out nearly the whole record alongside a few older cuts (and a preview of that new EP) for a reverent crowd. Porridge Radio will be missed, but I’m glad there was something of a full-circle moment that finally brought them to Allston before all was said and done.
Also of note on the night were openers Sluice, the folk-y, slowcore-ish project of singer/songwriter Justin Morris. I was tipped off to 2023’s Radial Gate by music writer Josh Terry’s newsletter, which is always good for recommendations of this sort, and was pleasantly surprised to find them on the bill. The songs had a bit more of a full-band bite on stage, but still stood to showcase Morris’ lived-in narratives and Callahan-isms.
Scroll below for photos from both sets.
