Porch Light Makes The Voodoo Room Feel Like The Main Stage
Two songs into Porch Light‘s sold out set at the Voodoo Room on Sunday night, it was already clear why this Minneapolis five-piece keeps outgrowing rooms. The upstairs space at San Diego’s House of Blues holds a few hundred people on a good night, and by the time the band tore into “Arctic,” the opener and thesis statement of their debut album Hush, every one of them was pressed against the low stage with no interest in retreating.
This is a band built for rooms like this, at least for now. Porch Light spent two years cutting their teeth in Minneapolis house shows before their debut EPs and the LP that arrived this month on Mom + Pop, and the live show carries that origin story in its bones: five people, no tracks, no bells and whistles, just riffs that announce themselves and choruses that reach and grab. Frontwoman Jackie Uhas stalks the stage like someone who grew up on Paramore and Hole and decided the only honest response to both was to become a bit of each.
The set drew heavily from Hush, recorded at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, the same secluded Minnesota spot where Nirvana made In Utero, with producer Caleb Wright capturing the band’s road tested chemistry live to tape. That decision translates. “Under,” the record’s most feral cut, came off like a threat in the best way, Uhas channeling what the band’s own materials call her best Courtney Love while guitarists Zac Fogarty and Kyle Siemon stacked riffs on top of each other. Bassist Henry Hughes and drummer Tony O’Keefe kept the whole thing churning forward with the rhythmic heft of a band that has spent two years learning exactly how hard it can push a room before the room breaks.
The night’s biggest moment belonged to “Paranoia,” and the data explains why before the first chord even landed. The single has pulled 3.5 million TikTok views in three weeks and over 2 million streams, and it sent their tour to 60 percent sold out before the album was even out. Live, it is pure public unraveling, tracing a relationship that blurs manipulation and intoxication until the narrator can’t hold herself together, and Uhas sang it like the edges were coming off in real time. The room sang every word back at her. They clearly learned the words three weeks ago. None of them sounded new at it.
The quieter stretches were where the band’s ambition showed most clearly. “Crossfire,” dreamy and reverbed, laments exposing a new partner to the unhealed parts of you, and in a room this small it landed like overhearing something private. “James,” the love song from someone convinced they’d already had their one shot, drew phone lights without anyone asking for them. The band closed with “Baggage,” the album’s final track, resolving on a guitar solo and a last full-throated chorus the way records used to end when ending meant something.
The through-line of the night was Uhas’s voice, which the album’s press materials rightly call rangy and unfiltered. In a venue the size of a large living room, with nowhere for imperfections to hide, she sounded better than the record, which is supposed to be the point and almost never is anymore.
Porch Light are past a million monthly Spotify listeners and playing storied rooms like the Troubadour and Bowery Ballroom on this run, with a First Avenue homecoming in Minneapolis waiting in November. Their stated goal is the Target Center, the biggest room in their home city, and you could squint on Sunday night and see it: a band that already plays like the headliner of a building, currently rehearsing in front of 400 lucky San Diegans who got to say they saw the room too small.
Hold onto that ticket stub. It won’t be a small room much longer.
