Hiss Golden Messenger, Sam Amidon
Ardmore Music Hall
23 E Lancaster Ave.
Philadelphia, PA
Nov. 4, 2026
It was great to hear Sam Amidon back at Ardmore Music Hall for the second time this year (I covered his double bill with Jake Xerxes Fussell back in April), even though he had a shorter set to work with this go-round. Amidon’s one of my favorite performers and artists for too many reasons to list, and at this stage in his career – eight albums in, give or take a few more, if you count Solo Fiddle or King Speechy – it’s almost a shame to only get thirty-five minutes of music from him in performance. Amidon mostly played music from last year’s Salt River, including “I’m On My Journey Home,” a shape-note song he’s adapted to feature an extremely-detuned and so-buzzy-it-distorts low string droning. He also ran through his versions of songs by Ornette Coleman, Taj Mahal, and Lou Reed; Amidon’s the rare interpreter who can as easily make ancient folk songs sound like his compositions as he can make a Lou Reed song sound like, well, an ancient folk song. For me, nothing charmed more than a dissonant, weirdo take on the folk song “Groundhog,” learned originally from Doc Watson’s more bluegrass-y style. In Amidon’s hands, the song ended with an extended, ear-scraping foray into atonality, screeching in freaky vocal-fried harmony along with unpredictable acoustic guitar clusters. Allegedly, this was the sound of the spirit of the (cooked and greasy) groundhog, but Amidon claimed he only intended to invoke one spirit – “not three.”
M.C. Taylor – the lifeblood of Hiss Golden Messenger, who writes the songs and leads the band – has a way of strumming his guitar with a loose flick of his wrist, like he’s wiping down the bar at his own unhurried pace, that nexus between work and play; I thought of tempos chosen for the natural pace of a task, a song sync’d up for a rowing crew, rhythm as self-governing and self-energizing. There’s a sneaky funkiness to his sense of rhythm, and more than once he’d kick a song off alone, scratching out a syncopated rhythm gently, just for the band to lock in somewhere I didn’t quite expect in the pocket. “How were you feeling when you woke up this morning?” Taylor asked the crowd, and throughout the night, between songs, he kept circling back to reiterate his profound relief at, at long last, a little bit of half-decent political news, half-not believing it. Center-stage, Taylor’s got a voice like blackstrap molasses, full of signature moves – end-phrase downward melismas, a tone that sounds like he’d swallowed a vintage tremolo pedal – and a soulful, unselfconscious contentedness in the sheer act of singing that is totally contagious, and on this tour he’s assembled a band that brings his songs to vivid gold-sounds life, equally adept at swampy folk-funk and southern-charmed, deep-fried classic rock. And yes, it should be said: more than a little jam-band adjacent, with lead guitarist Chris Boerner (playing a butterscotch-colored Gibson SG that I am covetous of) and Rhett Huffman often taking great extended solos, the whole rhythm section lifting their excursions to great places. (Boerner took a long and gorgeous solo in the third or fourth song, these lightly-shook octave-chord melodies begetting high-gain lead lines high on the neck that could have closed down a festival, and they were just getting started.) Through a set that highlighted their new album I’m People, the band still played older favorites of mine with greater energy than their recorded counterparts, drummer Matthew McCaughan propelling “Biloxi” and “I Need a Teacher” with active hi-hat swagger and smooth harmonies. “It feels like a Friday night,” Taylor told us, and he wasn’t the least bit wrong. His last spoken words to us were “this is the best,” before the band played their encore: new song “Mercy Avenue,” a resplendent Talk Talk kind of thing with brushed drums and bull fiddle, rich in new-leaf atmosphere, delayed guitar and keys ricocheting, ripples rippling, a vision of grace.
