XPN Fest, Day 3
Wiggins Park
2 Riverside Drive
Camden, NJ
September 20, 2026
Until yesterday I’d never attended WXPN’s XPoNential festival in any of its past iterations in all my years in Philly, and mostly associated the festival with an increasingly vague memory of Father John Misty going sort of indie-music-internet viral for using his 2016 festival slot to decry the state of things (points were made). And anyone who reads my stuff knows I tend to favor smaller shows over the kind where musicians sometimes get driven around on golf carts. But as end-of-summer festival settings go, the Camden waterfront facing Philadelphia is a fine setting to take in what ended up being a real grab-bag array of talent on XPNFest’s closing day.
I arrived in time to catch the tail end of Sierra Hull and her band’s rollicking, blazing-tempos bluegrass; I clocked a tune that they jokingly introduced as being in “the bluegrass-friendly key of B major” – you’d never know it was tricky from the graceful, note-y fiddling and mandolin chops – at somewhere around 170. That’s presto – Italian for very fast, folks. Hull was charismatic and easeful leading her hybrid bluegrass-rock band, with extremely tight close vocal harmonies and virtuosic improvised soloing, so impossibly fast and incessantly toe-tapping that I momentarily forgot the cloudy mood; it took the sudden midnight atmosphere of their set-closing, slow cover of Tears For Fears’ “Mad World” – complete with a shift to mallet percussion and atmospheric spatial reverbs on the fiddle – to whiplashingly remind me that the day itself was a bit grey and dreary.
Next I caught Ratboys, who I’ve covered for Midbrow previously, but if they’re committed and dedicated enough to grace Philly stages three times in one year, I can give them another shout, no? They sounded perhaps the best I’ve heard them this year, deeply tour-tight and dialed in; I got full-body chills during the biggest chorus of “Late Night Mountains All That,” singer Julia Steiner tapping into a bloodletting peak of a cry, the band building a head of steam and riding an unrelenting pulse, in full command of energy itself – how it’s harnessed, how it’s released (truly, a great rock band) – culminating in a wonderful extended noisy knob-twisting freakout. Darker new songs like that one and “What’s Right?” suited the mood the sky (and, by extension, moi) was in more that the Rats’ more sunny, twangy material; I could have taken 45-minute version of “What’s Right?”’s infectious rhythm and moody builds. (It didn’t hurt that lead guitarist Dave Sagan’s six-string prowess was especially high in the mix, highlighting his unfailingly marvelous, melodic and cool shredding. Also, shoutout to Philly's own Florry's resident fiddler Will Henriksen for guesting with plumy panache on "Morning Zoo" despite getting over the flu.)
The new-to-me highlight of the day personally, without question, was a stunning duo set from Madison Cunningham (piano, guitars and voice), joined by Midlake’s Jesse Chandler (woodwinds, Mellotron, synth, singing). Chandler has played with luminaries like Cass McCombs, Beth Orton and Mercury Rev; Cunningham is as formidable a musician and songwriter as we’ve got going right now, and this was my first time getting to see her live. It was honestly god-tier work: the two musicians delighted and awed me with heavy, low and positively menacing sounds – bass clarinet and super-detuned rubber bridge acoustics, fuzzed out – and sheer sonic sprawl, but utilized in service of intense, complex compositions, with Cunningham’s soaring, operatic voice always at the center, burning hot. I was genuinely just scratching my head throughout that they played such gorgeous, strange, melodically and harmonically rich and dense through-composed songs so easily, music absolutely fit for a hallowed concert hall. (My friend said the songs were “like dropping a string on the ground and it somehow falls in a beautiful, unpredictable pattern.”) They ended with “Goodwill” – “with a look that could devour me / sometimes I hope it will” – working up a devastating maelstrom of noise, gradually clearing into Chandler playing the Mellotron with a vocal sample, like some crazy ancient salvaged chant, and Cunningham above it celestially. It could have closed the festival; it could have closed my listening life without major complaint.
