Indie rock greats re-emerge at Outside Lands, better than ever

rewrite this content and keep HTML tags Guitarist Alec O’Hanley and vocalist Molly Rankin of Alvvays perform on the Lands End stage at Outside Lands on Saturday, Aug. 13, 2023.Charles Russo/SFGATEA hush fell over the sprawling crowd surrounding the Lands End stage at Outside Lands on Saturday afternoon when Canadian dream pop band Alvvays played the opening riffs of “Belinda Says,” the eleventh track on their latest album.Vocalist Molly Rankin sang about a bottle of blue Rev discretely swigged behind a drained hockey drink that she didn’t really need. It was a nostalgic reference to the White Claw-like beverage from her adolescence in Nova Scotia, Canada and serves as the name of the band’s highly anticipated third record that took nearly five years to make. The screen behind her looked like something out of a Richard Linklater movie: a dizzying shot of an endless green meadow, a suburban landscape whizzing by from a car window, and psychedelic blue waves that gave Golden Gate Park a much-needed pop of color against the tendrils of mist swirling beneath the gray San Francisco sky. AdvertisementArticle continues below this adThe haunting lullaby wasn’t meant to get the crowd jumping around. “Belinda Says” paints a portrait of a young woman’s unexpected pregnancy, sung by a narrator grappling with her fear of adulthood and the challenges of starting anew. The song was drenched in swells of unrelenting feedback, yet Rankin’s voice was never lost in the mix; instead, it rang out like a revelation when she made a reference to Go-Go’s vocalist and early influence Belinda Carlisle: “Belinda says that heaven is a place on Earth, well so is hell.” As I looked around, everyone seemed to have fallen into an introspective trance – even the frat bro in overalls inexplicably waving a corn flag in the crowd stopped what he was doing to look on, apparently mesmerized. It’s one of the most brilliant tracks of the decade – Pitchfork named it the number one song of the year, while Stereogum and Exclaim gave the same ranking to the album in its entirety. Yet, “Blue Rev” seemed doomed from the start.Guitarist Alec O’Hanley, bassist Abbey Blackwell, vocalist Molly Rankin, and keyboardist Kerri MacLellan of Alvvays perform on the Lands End stage at Outside Lands on Saturday, Aug. 13, 2023.Charles Russo/SFGATEAlvvays began writing the songs that would form the tracklist for the new record not long after the release of their 2017 sophomore album “Antisocialites.” Then, they were faced with an avalanche of setbacks: a thief broke into Rankin’s home and stole a recorder full of demos, a basement flood damaged most of the band’s gear, and the pandemic hit. Founding member and bassist Brian Murphy left the band, and they couldn’t rehearse with their new rhythm section — drummer Sheridan Riley and bassist Abbey Blackwell — for months due to border closures. As years passed and Alvvays mostly stayed out of the public eye, fans began to share Photoshopped memes of the “missing” band on milk cartons as rumors swirled of a breakup. AdvertisementArticle continues below this ad“I think a lot of artists are really used to hearing no and disappointment and things not working out, so everything that happened along the way seemed kind of typical to me, but it has become part of the story of making this record,” Rankin said.The singer prefers to keep a low profile. During a Zoom interview about a week before Alvvays’ appearance in San Francisco, Rankin spoke from the Toronto apartment she’s sharing with all four other members of the band — guitarist and partner Alec O’Hanley, keyboardist and childhood friend Kerri MacLellan, Riley and Blackwell — while on a quick stopover during a world tour. She’s trying to figure out how to keep her plants alive while she’s gone, fix a laundry list of broken gear and amplifiers, and see family and friends before venturing back to the U.S. to play Lollapalooza in Chicago, Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Denver, UCCU Center in Utah, and eventually Outside Lands (their second performance at the festival since 2015.) After that, they’ll play a few more stops with Alex G and Maggie Rogers, then jet off to Mexico City, Taipei, Tokyo and Bangkok. Now that the band has been on tour for a year, the obstacles of creating their latest album seem like a distant dream. In late 2021, Alvvays quietly joined forces in the studio with Grammy Award-winning producer Shawn Everett (best known for his work with Kacey Musgraves and the Killers) and they recorded two takes of the record front-to-back, straight to tape, reportedly stopping for only 15 seconds between each song. Fans were relieved and elated when last summer, the band finally released a new single, “Pharmacist.” “I’m so happy I could literally cry,” one of hundreds of commenters wrote on YouTube. AdvertisementArticle continues below this ad“Blue Rev” debuted in October to rave reviews from critics, some of whom called it the best album the band had ever released. They were invited to perform “Belinda Says” on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” made a devoted fan out of Keanu Reeves, and got a glowing nod from the Go-Go’s Carlisle, who called the track she was referenced in “awesome” and said she hoped to perform it with the band someday. “One of the things that I learned very early on in life is that the world keeps going even though you’re going through something awful,” Rankin said. “And so you don’t really get that much time to feel sorry for yourself. And so that’s what we did. We picked up the pieces and just kept moving forward and things eventually formed, somehow unimaginably.”Born in 1987, Rankin grew up in a musical household. Her late father, John, was the fiddle player of the storied Celtic folk group the Rankin Family Band, and as a child, she tinkered around with several instruments including piano before deciding to try the string instrument for herself.AdvertisementArticle continues below this ad“He really shaped the way I played and was a great teacher,” Rankin said. “We had a very unique, close relationship.”On a January morning when she was 12 years old, her father was driving her older brother and two of his friends to a hockey match when he swerved from the road, likely to avoid a salt pile, and his truck plummeted down an 80-foot cliff. The boys managed to escape from the vehicle and swim back to shore, but John never made it back. He was 40 years old when he died.“Eventually, when he was killed, I just sort of put the fiddle down for a while and lost my drive to play,” said Rankin, now 36. “I was getting older. I was right at the age where I felt like I was probably wanting to do something different anyway, something that felt like a path that I could create for myself rather than trying to emulate what he was doing.” Vocalist Molly Rankin and keyboardist Kerri MacLellan of Alvvays perform on the Lands End stage at Outside Lands on Saturday, Aug. 13, 2023.Charles Russo/SFGATEAdvertisementArticle continues below this adOne day, when no one was home, she picked up a guitar and started learning chords and writing her own songs inspired by the top 40 radio hits she played on her boombox from singer-songwriters like Avril Lavigne, Chantal Kreviazuk and Michelle Branch. “All of those voices, I mean, I assume that my singing voice and my writing style is just fragments of those women mushed together,” Rankin said. By the time she was in high school, she met O’Hanley at a show and they became friends, bonding over their love of Scottish rock band Teenage Fanclub. They talked about producing and recording some of their own music together, had MacLellan join in, plus “whoever could get their shifts covered on the weekends and play with us,” Rankin said.   The band formed in 2011 and subsequently released their debut self-titled album in 2014. Singles like “Archie, Marry Me” and “Adult Diversion” became instant cult favorites and were constantly on repeat at my college radio station. At Outside Lands, I found myself thinking back to the first time I saw Alvvays at Maha festival in Omaha around this time — not yet 21 and smuggling vodka into an empty sunscreen bottle that I mixed into a cup of tepid Coca-Cola. Even then, it was apparent that something about Alvvays would click with fans on a lasting level. Their sound somehow melded the lushness…

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