Maizie’s Review
This past weekend, Charly Bliss brought a perfect mix of sugary punk rock and 2000s throwback pop to the stage of Club Dada. The crowd for Charly Bliss was an eclectic mix of people from all different generations that found their way to Charly Bliss’s music in the years since the release of their debut album Guppy in 2017, unexpectedly including one of my professors for this semester (shoutout to Dr. Wright, the most hardcore Charly Bliss fan I know). Between Charly Bliss’s amazing performance and the fact that the man responsible for grading my capstone paper was standing behind me the whole time, it was a concert experience that I will never forget.
Charly Bliss’s opener, PRONOUN, took the stage as audience members continued to trickle in from the streets of Deep Ellum. The three-piece band immediately made an impression with their matching black and red boiler suits. PRONOUN’s mix of pop, indie rock, and emo provided a perfect preview for Charly Bliss’s later explosion of pop rock energy. Particular highlights of the opening set included “stay” and “run,” two songs about lead-singer Alyse Vellturo getting dumped from their album i’ll show you stronger (Velturo carefully clarified that these songs were based on the same dumping and that they are not constantly getting dumped by a multitude of people).
The crowd continued to grow after PRONOUN wrapped up their set, growing increasingly excited as the intermission music rotated between 90s and 2000s indie rock and pop favorites ranging from the Magnetic Fields to “Why Can’t I” by Liz Phair. Right after I identified the opening notes of a Michelle Branch song, the music cut out and the four members of Charly Bliss took the stage. My disappointment at skipping the Michelle Branch track was quickly replaced with excitement as Charly Bliss broke out into a riotous performance of “Tragic,” the opening track of their new album Forever. Despite some issues with the venue’s sound and the band’s in-ear monitors, Charly Bliss delivered a perfect performance, expertly playing through the technical difficulties.
After “Tragic” and the resolution of the technical difficulties, Charly Bliss rotated through a collection of songs from their three albums. Throughout the long seventeen song set—not counting encore tracks—lead singer Eva Hendricks brought an inextinguishable energy to the stage, bouncing around and wildly gesticulating to the music in her very coquette stage outfit. The rest of the members—drummer Sam Hendricks, guitarist Spencer Fox, and bassist Dan Shure—also held their own, bringing a perfect combination of musicianship and stage presence.
By the end of the set, I had jumped, clapped, and screamed out lyrics to multiple songs. Charly Bliss closed out their show with the perfect pop song that is “Back There Now” and departed the stage just long enough for the game of adult peek-a-boo that we are forced to engage in at concerts when waiting for the band to come out for their encore. When the band finally ducked out from Dada’s tiny green room, they brought the energy back to 100 with a performance of “Chatroom.” As Eva pointed the mic to the crowd asking them to sing along to the words “I wanna see you stripped down, naked” all I could think about was 1. How great this concert was 2. The fact that my professor was standing right behind me. Charly Bliss closed out the night with a cover of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone,” which just made me think about how great a Kelly Clarkson cover of “Percolator” would be (producers of the Kelly Clarkson Show if you’re reading this I have something to talk to you about).
Dr. Wright’s Review
Mrs. Rivers did not actually live at Laura Ingalls Wilder Elementary School. She had a real life, and a car, and went to Wal-Mart. Seeing my third grade teacher in the cereal aisle was equal parts fascinating and for reasons I can’t explain, embarrassing. Now in my 10th year teaching history at UTD, I am very much on the other side of that dynamic.
Last Saturday as I waited for Charly Bliss to take the stage at Club Dada, I felt a similar strange sense of dislocation after seeing one of my students near the stage. The awkwardness receded quickly, however, and by the time I left, I felt gratitude. That is largely because this is a particularly smart and interesting student (and as you can see here, she writes better than me). But there was also something valuable about being reminded of my job as a history professor while listening to this music.
This is the sixth time I have seen Charly Bliss play live, including just a few weeks ago in Washington DC where they kicked off this latest tour. I’m not new to this music, but the haunting specter of my student helped me hear it in a new way, as if for the first time. My students might partly keep me young, but they also remind me that I am, in fact, less young every year. Having this reminder at a Charly Bliss show brought extra joy and deeper meaning in singing along to “I’m not dead! I’m not, I’m not dead!”
But the dead are definitely with me. As a historian, I have made a career of reading the private thoughts of people who are dead. Like extremely dead. I am reminded constantly that life is a terminal condition. None of us are getting out of here alive. But there is power in contemplating humans who lived in times very different from ours. And, as I learned, there is also something revelatory about imagining art through the eyes of someone half your age.
This collision between my career and my favorite hobby unlocked new meanings to songs I love very much. “Back There Now” confesses the lengths we go to pursue unhealthy experiences before defiantly proclaiming “You couldn’t pay me to go back there now.” From the first listen, I liked this idea of lessons learned, but at this show I finally caught the next line, “So I tell myself, so it might come true.” This is actually a song about how past mistakes never leave us, maybe because small parts of us might want to make those same mistakes again. Similarly, “Calling You Out” chronicles how we often unthinkingly perpetuate cycles of toxicity. The past is always with us. “Waiting for You” is a beautiful love song to bandmates, and it reminded me of the longstanding friendships that have sustained me, as well as the special bonds that can come with working alongside people you love and respect. While I have never had to live in a van with my colleagues, the experience of teaching in the humanities today increasingly bears similarities to the kind of desperate existence of struggling artists—and last year’s crisis on our campus has absolutely trauma-bonded me with some fellow professors.
While I have not necessarily outgrown the inexplicable embarrassment that comes from teacher-student encounters in the wild, this concert was a pleasant reminder that I have indeed outgrown some things. I am no longer “young enough to believe that love should hurt this much.” That knowledge is hard-earned, and I both carry and have inflicted scars that prove it can. Some things you can’t learn in a classroom. Maybe the most important things.
