Raavi, The Goodbye Party, Carmen Perry
Utility Works – Art Studios & Maker Space
Lansdowne, PA
Oct. 22, 2026
Keep following Baltimore Avenue west and you’ll end up in short order in Lansdowne, a small borough that I primarily engage with in the context of attending (and, for the first time this year, performing at) Open Sound Lansdowne, an outdoor summer music series organized by The Goodbye Party’s Mikey Cantor, a friend of mine who lives in the area. Over the last few years a few more of my friends have been making the move out there and trying to make cool DIY things happen; last night’s show at Utility Works was hopefully the first of many to come. I didn’t explore the entirety of the space – it seemed more vast than meets the eye, with almost two dozen artist studios, even a ceramics studio – and spent the whole show in the ground-floor gallery space, where they’d set up the PA and floor-level stage, with glittery backdrop curtains; the space was welcoming and sound was surprisingly good, with collage materials set out for anyone interested in making something before or during the show. (And don’t ask me how they pulled off the free beer situation, but obviously it was pretty clutch and obviously I indulged.)
Raavi, from New York, was the only full-band set of the night. Led by Raavi Sita (guitar, vocals), the band was casually set up – Sita on a stool, a rarity – but dialed in, with ravishing guitar-bass-and-drums arrangements of fluid, melodic R&B-indebted dream-pop. I was struck repeatedly by the vocal melodies, their tendency to target and settle into tense notes, holding fast to a pitch the chords don’t imply, over supple, smooth grooves and chorus’d guitars, lingering in the romantic implications of jazzy 7th chords. “I feel like I’m side-eyeing the audience tonight,” Sita said jokingly (the band was sort of at an angle, in the middle of a narrow space, most of us off to their left) – it sort of added to the casual excellence of their set, like it would have been just as good if we weren’t there to witness. (I found myself repeatedly fixated on the use of fretless bass, especially in the first song, when the bassist employed a two-handed tapping technique where, at first, one low note glissando’d into the step above it, and then later, the addition of a 10th above that, his right hand simultaneously tapping out another note to slide up – a cool illusion of one instrument doing the work of two, executed flawlessly.)
The aforementioned The Goodbye Party closed the night out (fittingly) with an exquisite solo set: trying mostly new songs in a new arrangement, Cantor playing flatwound-equipped electric guitar – sometimes bowing it for cello-like sounds – and sang while heavily relying on a SP-404 sampler for beats and one-shot samples, all a lovingly-assembled assortment of sonic candy. Cantor has one of my favorite voices in all of music – a sort of crushed sincerity, unabashedly pretty, melodies skirting the edge of his range – and though his songs match that earnest loveliness bar for bar, his strategy of couching his arrangements in strange samples and sometimes-vocoded singing does the great trick of amplifying the unknowable, unquantifiable and private aspects of those feelings. The chorus of one new song, called “CD” I think, goes – all of this is pouring out / and there’s some old CD skipping while I’m / cryin’ with the windows down / heaven knows I’ll never know you now – and there’s this delicious mimetic melodic hiccup when he gets to the paired iambs of some-old, C-D, ski-ppin’, while I’m that is just a perfectly-realized, form-meets-function hook; any show with a new song that good is worth a trolley ride to Lansdowne.
