100 Watt Horse, Cooper Kenward, Golden West Service
The Last Drop
1300 Pine St.
Philadelphia
July 7, 2026
Last night at The Last Drop, we trickled into the basement for a show that flowed through three similar yet distinctive sets of acoustic guitar-centered song craft, with just one dynamic mic – turned up hot with a touch of reverb, treated almost like a ribbon mic, sensitive enough to pick up our cheers and claps and send them back at us. Picture the room: tightly packed and warm, dark crimson walls that gave everyone’s face the look of blushing or fever, a couple bottles of lamplit Polands on the table by the PA, those walls and the ceiling covered with flyers and scrawled drawings and messages (sometimes crude and scatalogical, sometimes heartwarming, and, most true of my experience, in red lettering against the white ceiling: “My neck hurts from reading all these!!”) – the people occasionally retreating for water or a breath of fresh air when it got too toasty down there. This was my first time checking out a show at The Last Drop and you could be forgiven for forgetting you were in a cafe’s basement; it has that authentic dark-punk-club feeling, not one of mere storage space.
Golden West Service was up first. The trio – electric bass, a drummer armed with brushes and only snare, kick and ride, plus the singing nylon-string guitarist – reminded me of a cross between early Microphones and Little Wings, as though the dark and stormy portent of Phil Elverum’s earliest songs was mixed, like a liquid, with the light, airy, beachy touch of Kyle Fields. Frontperson Matt L. Roar sang off-mic in an earnest and good-natured bleat of a voice, reminding me of the best of Daniel Johnston, Ryland Bouchard and Paul Baribeau, the strummed nylon strings like columns of energy propping up rapid-fire flurries of words.
With a strummed intro, Roar introduced a song, saying, “This one’s about how we all die.”
“You know how that’s gonna happen?!” I shouted in reply.
“I don’t know how,” Roar smirked. “But I know it’s gonna happen.” And so the song’s big, repetitive three-chord chug and stomp began, grooving and riding and riding along; “Everyone dies / Everyone tries to hide from the big surprise,” he sang near the song’s end, with the big surprise being that it wasn’t quite the end. Far from it.
That set was followed quickly by Cooper Kenward, traveling from Los Angeles and performing on a borrowed guitar because Delta Airlines tragically destroyed his, somehow. His song “Dive Bar Days” had echoes of Paul Westerberg – very reminiscent melodically of The Replacements classic “Swingin’ Party” – and his singing and phrasing reminded me of the Drive-By Truckers, Jason Isbell especially; throughout his set he impressed with dynamic and juicy phrasing, getting the most out of his six strings, sketching characters and scenes vividly and memorably. I especially dug a tune called “Wheelies” – “a song about being in high school and not knowing what you’re doin’” – populated with Harry Dean Stanton, a “girlfriend mouthing off to a cop,” a sister you’d better not say is hot, and the memory of the time “you rolled your ankle so bad / we had to call your dad / and we hate your dad.”
Closing the night was 100 Watt Horse, the songwriting project of George Pettis, an Atlanta-born musician who lovingly describes himself as totally sold on Philly since moving here a few years back. Pettis is a wonderful story-weaver in song, employing many of my favorite tricks: gorgeous, rough-and-resonant melodies, open-D Travis picking, the strings moving in rolling and rippling octaves, with an earthiness to his singing that lulls you into a conversational comfort zone before surprising, delighting and affecting with something like a melismatic, 40-note rendering of a single word, like “sorry,” employed not merely to impress or stun with melodic grace (which it did, believe me) but to stretch at and interrogate the word itself, putting its meaning through the ringer, just like the singer.
