LAKE, Karl Blau and Seth Baird
Johnny Brenda's
1201 Frankford Ave.
Philadelphia
April 27, 2025
This past Sunday I ventured out of Germantown to make the goofy, ugly, speed bump-blotted drive to Johnny Brenda’s for a concert: LAKE, with Karl Blau and Seth Baird opening the night.
LAKE is on tour from Washington State – Whidbey Island to be precise, about 30 miles north of Seattle – and though Blau and Baird are both currently local to Philadelphia, there was a deeper connection at play.
Baird grew up on Whidbey Island, looking up to LAKE as the cool village elders showing the kids you could start a dope indie rock band without being in the big city. And Blau is himself a legend of the Pacific Northwest indie rock scene, a native of Washington State and longtime former resident of Anacortes, which astute music nerds will recognize as the island town known for incubating Phil Elverum’s The Microphones and Mount Eerie projects. (He’s also my neighbor, though not for much longer; I’m about to move.) Not to mention that Philly label Don Giovanni released LAKE’s most recent, and excellent, LP, March’s Bucolic Gone.
This is all to say: the show was a feel-good affair, and a reunion of sorts, assembled with intention and love. LAKE rarely tours this far east, so you could feel the collective appreciation and good fortune; Blau and LAKE are longtime collaborators, and Baird’s band was playing live for only the second or third time, making a special point of sharing the stage with their fellow Washingtonians.
There was a pervasive musical sensibility that carried through each set; maybe it comes from living on island time. Baird’s set of mostly-unreleased songs, presented in power trio format with drummer Clay Kaledin and bassist Dash Flach, had me and my friend Will smiling up in the balcony and asking ourselves: “Is this yacht rock?”
Blau and his squad brought more of a trippy, funky, mischievous attitude to their performance, but his smooth baritone and playful spirit kept returning me to a seaside state of mind.
I lived in the Pacific Northwest myself before moving to Philly, and Sunday night musically summoned that old feeling where any summer morning you might expect a text simply stating: “River day?” (A far cry from a walk in the Wissahickon, where any mention of swimming is accompanied by a judgment or defense of those who do. And though it takes three hours to drive from Portland to the Oregon coast, you don’t mind it because it’s utterly verdant, replete with old growth and smooth roads; it couldn’t be more different from the construction-filled and Wawa-bespeckled honking festival you encounter en route to the Jersey shore.)
LAKE was exceptional, their set largely consisting of selections from the new record. Near the front of the left side of the stage, two people spent nearly the entire show dancing in tandem, which bassist-singer Ashley Eriksson made a point to express joy over between songs. But the band fed that directly, with a kaleidoscopic performance that featured three-part harmonies, hard-grooving drum and bass, guitar that went from smooth and dreamy to growling and fierce – all with a playful, irreverent, and sometimes downright funny spirit (I’ve had their song "Ferarri"'s refrain, “energizer bunny / energizer bunny, oh!” stuck in my head all week).
I feel the need to express, though, that my take on the night was informed by my knowledge, and attention, toward the understory. Any given night in a big city you can go to a concert. Not all of them are intimate, communal affairs. This one was, and it was all the more magical, and meaningful, for it, like a clear summer day after a long, grey, cloudy winter.
