Stella Stella, Taurus Judge, Full Body 2
Spruce Street Harbor Park
301 S Christopher Columbus Blvd
Philadelphia
June 4, 2026
All summer long, Spruce Street Harbor Park’s gonna play host to free shows on the waterfront – ! FREE SHOWS ! LIVE & LOCAL, the posters boast – and last night I finally caught an iteration, a true all-locals, all-guitar-music bill of Stella Stella, Taurus Judge and the headliners, Full Body 2. Stella Stella, a band with only a few tracks out so far, reminded me of that great stylistic thing where certain kinds of dissonance, certain rhythmic patterns and syncopations, just sound right as rain… like massive distorted tritones over the IV in the bass… a sound I always like. They were an energizing blend of chorus-’d-out Fender guitars slashing over post-punk beats, gaze-y fuzz and '90s-style breakbeats, dual lead vocalists singing sans-annunciation an octave or two away from each other, plus samples and bananas sound design in the interstitials and the intros. There were some really cool nutty-sounding, pre-recorded synths on their closing song, which reminded me of Spirit of the Beehive circa Hypnic Jerks with its high-octane, alternating 7/4 and 15/8 groove. A band to watch.
Taurus Judge threatened to steal the show for me: a glorious, Sonic Youth-indebted blend of all-downstrokes-driving-headlong-through-walls guitars, microtonal and just-slightly-off unisons, strings beautifully out of tune (guitarist Ian Norris apologized once or twice for forgetting to bring their tuner; might I suggest forgetting it more often? whatever was happening, the steel-wool abrasion of the sound thrilled me) – their songs, vocals deeply encased and blurred, were essentially a barrage of clanging, metallic attack-heavy detuned riffs, all of them dope. Remember: riffs are cool, and thus songs made out of cool riffs are cool. Weird time signatures weren’t utilized so much as a technical flex than as gnawing, mesmerizing, transmuting phenomenon twisting your brain around – and that’s cool too. The music was mean and larval, bitter and shifty, pouncing less like a predator than like a gut parasite – and with a predator, at least you have a chance at getting away. The drums were frenetic and pulse-bounding, the kick moving in your throat, the song forms shifting, abrupt and hairpin, then slashing and insistent, over before you knew it, brutal like an accident — I thought of Slint if they slithered like a throng of eels, full speed ahead. The drummer was wearing a cool faded Neil Young ZUMA shirt; I’d like to think the godfather of grunge would approve.
The mighty Full Body 2 ended the show with the sun down and the light show in full effect. Kind of a crazy intense one, too! (Blasted the backs of my eyelids so much I genuinely worried about the long-term effects.) Though on my radar for years now, I’d never seen them before, and was expecting a little more of a shoegaze-meets-Playstation-main-menu blend of sounds, but what I heard seemed to me more of a classic, perfectly-realized shoegaze thing — high-volume, high-energy, and harmonically wandering, drifty chords and phosphorescent melodies. The lead guitar was pitched up an octave, synth-y and melodic and gliding all over the place; the songs were a mesmerizing swirl of sound and color, with some late-in-the-set highlights that were so hooky and catchy I’m going to spend some time with their discography today to chase those tracks down. Lest you think that this lyrically-unintelligible, cool-distance show was devoid of earnest sincerity, the non-musical highlight of the night was when, introducing the band near the end, guitarist and vocalist Dylan Vaisey gestured toward bassist-singer Cassidy Rose Hammond and said: “That’s Cass, the goddamn love of my fucking life.” I couldn’t help but awww.
