KulfiGirls
The Dolphin Tavern
1539 S Broad St.
Philadelphia
April 24, 2024
Amid the fuzz rock, punk and noise music bouncing off the walls of the Dolphin Tavern Wednesday night, I found myself transported out of South Philly and into a Lisa Frank-like wonderland — as Carnatic rock crew KulfiGirls cut through an acidic night with an experimental mixture of sweet, sometimes gritty pop, colorful multi-instrumentalism, and neon joy.
The KulfiGirls were one of three native Philly acts to perform at the Dolphin show, bookended by the laidback Larlene, self-described curators of a “dream pop stoner metal float tank for your heart,” and The Angies, a high-intensity punk group eager to join their audience on a soft-mosh dance floor.
The collective show was an epic display of diverse energies, each band exploring different musical tactics to grant the audience secondary entry — past the nightclub doors, which cost $12 to enter, and into a series of introspective worlds, each dealing with human pain and pleasure using disparate tools, skills and perspective.
Larlene’s lo-fi, post-punk sound kept me in my own head, perhaps the most familiar soundscape for overthinking loners in need of solace and escape. The Angies brought the crowd together by abandoning the stage altogether to transfer their abrasive but skillfully catchy songs into dance floor double motion.
But I found myself almost hypnotized by the middle act: KulfiGirls.
KulfiGirls is currently made up of four musicians — Abi Natesh, Joan Gizzio, Stephanie Ruberti-Bruning, and Adesola Ogunleye-Sowemimo. (I can only assume they named themselves after the rich frozen dairy dessert born in India.) They seemed each entirely themselves onstage while together forming a rare sound defined by a sense of devotion that can be cultivated only through connection to and care for others.
In the dusty venue that is the Dolphin, it was hard to hear any of the band’s lyrics, which Natesh sang with a versatile, yearning voice that held a kind of self-aware intimacy that reminded me of indie rocker Mitski but also verged into unleashed power particular to five foot pop stars, perhaps landing on a Haley Williams’ level of Paramore potency.
Over the course of their set, Natesh jumped between playing acoustic guitar, smiling with brazen excitement at the three other musicians shredding away with equally apparent exhilaration, to sitting cross-legged on the floor with the Saraswati veena, an ancient and highly resonant South Indian string instrument, at times with eyes closed in a meditative concentration.
Gizzio ravaged granular guitar parts, face obscured by long tendrils of hair, while Ruberti-Bruning transitioned between strings and flute, perhaps the most elated source of fun on stage, all as Ogunleye-Sowemimo held it down with clashing drums.
The band kept it tight while exploring all kinds of musical territory, from dreamy psychedelia to high-energy, sandy pop, with hair down and bold-patterned skirts wavering under devil-red spotlights. It took me out of the nightclub and replaced my eyesight with visions of holographic, rainbow dolphins falling in love — generated by memories of neon lunch boxes and notepads sold to elementary school girls like me by Lisa Frank.
Maybe the association was catalyzed by the band’s channeling of unabashed feminine release, experimenting with both traditional South Indian sounds and alt pop all while unearthing a totally novel form of non-conformity.
After the show, upon requesting lyrics from the crew, I realized how the band was able to transfer the emotion of girlhoods lived, lost and gone purely energetically — while discovering a level of grown-up grit preserved through poetry that was otherwise lost on me during the live show.
“Amma I’m sorry/ I know I just lay here rotting/ So Amma please don’t worry/ Cuz soon I’ll be forgotten,” the lyrics to one song, “Araro,” read. “Nee petha ponu (the girl you gave birth to)/ Na that amma (is me)/ You’ll comb thru my hair/ Untangle the knots/ Til I am nothing.”
The sense of worship and snarled desire I felt in each musical performance was affirmed by certain semantic choices, like one verse from their song, “Field of Fireflies,” on which Natesh sings, “I saw the fire in her eyes/ Give it some time/ Before she burns me alive/ And I don’t mind the heat I’m just begging for her love/ Shower me in ashes with her passion from above.”
But the sense of support and fun displayed on stage, enchanting enough that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the vision enveloping in front of me, was so strong that I was surprised by the darkness of other lyrics I learned only after the fact: “Lingering fear/ Of words unsaid/ Is this is it, is this all/ And it’s seeping/ Into my fabrication of reality/ Dripping down the walls/ It paralyzes but I still grind my teeth/ While I’m not here, I’m not here, I’m not here.”
It adds up that the musical adventure undertaken by KulfiGirls, and the sense of completion and fun that stems from their collective presence on stage, is in part the result of fear about failure to belong and the torture of internal uncertainty and self-hate.
“You could try to ignore/ Push the dissonance way down/ Deep into your core/ You’ll be blinded with beautiful/ Well I don’t want that/ Not like I used to/ Oh I don’t want that/ And I wish you didn’t want it too,” Natesh pled into the mic towards the end of a set, next to an off-stage sign instructing: “Absolutely no requests!”
“You could never be ugly like me!” Natesh bragged, reversing those mental insecurities into high voltage muscle. “Oh what are you scared of? Is it ugly inside you? Is it ugly?”
It’s all part of the multi-dimensional magic that happens when the beliefs, feelings and truths often constricted inside school books, journals and folders — Lisa Frank themed or not — are reimagined out loud.
NEXT
You can listen to the KulfiGirls’ first recorded single, “FOF,” (which stands for “Field of Fireflies” and not for “Fuck off Friday,”) on Spotify. Abi Natesh and Joan Gizzio, meanwhile, will next perform live as a duo at Queerpallooza on June 8 and at the Attic Brewing Company on June 29.
Nora, on the other hand, sets out for some heavy metal meditation — by attending a yoga class fundraiser set to live metal music.
