Illuminati Hotties miss the clean rhyme at The Sinclair on Wednesday, 16 October 2024.

Daffo pulls their own strings in the opening slot.

Daffo hit the stage with alt pop/rawk tunes and a special guest in the form of a marionette “without strings.” Which sounds like a supremely liberated puppet. No gods, no masters, no strings.

The marionette had recently starred in a music video for Daffo’s “Get A Life.”

Check it out.

Just one word about the headliner Illuminati Hotties before I defer to the writeup for my Cambridge Day gig.

The band name hints at a cleaner rhyme than it delivers. The extra ‘s’ in “Hotties” hangs off the end of the name like a glass of wine straddling the lip of a table, ready to shatter on the floor with any inadvertent bump of the hip or elbow. Unsettling.

“Illuminati Hottie” is the clean rhyme. No hangover. But there are four hotties in the band, so what are you going to do?

Illuminati Hotties, brainchild of producer and performer Sarah Tudzin, toured through Harvard Square last hump day on the wings of her album Power. Make no mistake, the night was a celebration of the new release. A barn door-sized neon light hung above the stage, gently burning the title “Power” into the room’s collective retina.

What kind of power? Soft power? Girl power? Mighty Morphin power? Maybe more like the power of “tender punk,” which is a musical premise that Illuminati Hotties have been plugging for at least half a decade. Kind of punk, but with feeling this time? Less “I Wanne Be Your Dog,” more “I Wanna Keep Yr Dog.”

Less pit stomping, more pit loving.

You buy that? I won’t force you to. Tudzin paints with a broad palette, which is just what you’d expect from a pro who doubles as a producer on diverse and delightful projects like boygenius, Weyes Blood, Speedy Ortiz, Cloud Nothings, and more. Even better than inventing your own genre is not being bound by any genre at all.

The music felt bright, poppy, searching. Producers can be strange and exacting birds when it comes to recording their own music. As if all the time spent helping others find their sound needed to be won back in a single record. Illuminati Hotties mostly avoid programmatic statements and stick to the real bread & butter. Riffs, refrains, fills, hooks, like the especially sticky sweet hook on standout “The L.”

Daffo opened the evening, joined onstage by “a marionette without strings,” which, by most estimates, is just an ordinary puppet.

Photo Gallery