Sunshine Riot rains down on you at Middle East on Thursday, 5 April 2024.

Twig, The Magic City, and Shotgun Waltz sandwich the fourstack bill on the opening night of the Rock N Roll Rumble.

Anngelle Wood of Boston Emissions puts on her emcee hat, emcee jacket, and emcee boots.

The first night is the magic night. All the possibilities are laid out in front of you and nothing’s off the table.

“Pace yourself,” Anngelle Wood advised from the stage.

Sure, the preliminary rounds of the 2024 Rock N Roll Rumble continue with five more shows through April 13th. So don’t shoot off all your rockets the first night.

What’s the Rumble, you ask?

It’s the “World Series of Boston Rock,” which doesn’t make sense as an analogy if you compare the different tournament structures of the music competition with the baseball finals, but it sounds awesome.

Bottom line: most every year since 1979 bands in the area battle it out for prizes, new fans, and honors. Check out the Rumble website for event info. And the Wikipedia page has a pretty comprehensive history of the competition.

OK, let’s play ball.

The four-piece protopunk rockers Shotgun Waltz kicked off the first set, which included a song called “Pay To Play.” You know, where the people doing the work are paying instead of getting paid?

There’s all kinds of pay-to-play scams in the music industry, so keep your head screwed on straight to suss them out. With all the AI bots swarming over social media posts, maybe younger kids are more familiar with general scammery than the older generation? Or maybe not.

What’s really offensive about these scams is not so much the money lost (though that sucks too) – whether it’s some bogus promotional scam, or a venue putting their hand in your pocket after a live show, or something like that – it’s the way these scams are designed to prey on the the purest instinct a musician has: to just get their music out there.

Sounds like Shotgun Waltz has a 10-song EP coming out soon, which means really short songs or a really long EP.

The frontman for The Magic City was really working the lip of the stage. Might be a good crotch shot in the photo gallery somewhere. The four-piece ran the gamut of rock genres, but settled into what felt like their wheelhouse, big 70s guitar rock with shades of glam and grind. Good crowd response.

You hear Sunshine Riot on record and you hear the grunge influence. The fronter’s got a raucous, raspy edge to his vocals that can set a lyric on fire.

Shades of country in the mix as well, which you always knew was part of the grunge repertoire, listening to the heavy rustic roadhouse timbre of certain songs by Alice In Chains, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and more.

The four-piece evolves one step further from grunge, back into hard rocking country. Or maybe they’re like those prehistoric whales that looked like bears, and lived on land, and decided over the millennia to return to the sea. Sunshine Riot = prehistoric whales.

And in what looks like a clever, nostalgia-driven setlist tactic, the band opted for one cover. A distinctive rendition of a song by local favorite, and previous Rumbler, Morphine. Was it “Cure For Pain”?

Infinite bonus points for the fretless bass.

In a preview this writer wrote up for Cambridge Day, Twig was compared to an Aughtsy Paramore.

That’s a little bit of a stretch, but the premise of the preview blurb was that each band on the night represented a decade. The Magic City = 70s. Shotgun Waltz = 80s. Sunshine Riot = 90s. So Twig had to equal the 00s.

A case can be made for the Aughtsy assignation. Why make it though? On Thursday night the lines of influence in Twig’s sound were much more reliably drawn between late 70s hard rock, early 80s metal, to the present day. Headbanging from the bassist, rocking the 5-string, and wild solos from the guitarist.

You know, sometimes writers stretch the truth to fit the world within certain minor literary conceits. Sometimes you sacrifice the details to bring the Big Picture into focus. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

That’s life. And the first night of the 2024 Rock N Roll Rumble is done and dusted.

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