Music

During other moments, Laufey’s dazzling instrumental capabilities mesmerized the concertgoers into a spellbinding silence. Showcasing her soaring range throughout the nearly 90-minute set, the singer-songwriter played the guitar, cello and piano. 

The duo boasts an indescribable intimacy, an inimitable collaboration between them that makes their onstage presence magnetic. During “Girls Are Mean,” they leaned into each other as they played, touching heads, mullets mixing, Shore’s curly and dark against Altendahl’s lighter one.

On a Sunday afternoon outside Zellerbach Hall, concert-goers of all ages dodged stray skateboards to line up for Berkeley Symphony's season opener “American Kaleidoscope.” The question presumably on the crowd’s mind? How would conductor Joseph Young revamp the program’s 100-year-old centerpiece: George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue?”

In a universe as vast as ours, Boygenius has the uncanny ability to hone in on the ubiquity of it all. The Rest is a worthy follow-up to The Record — each track a radiant star in the indie macrocosm.

Gone is the melancholic, oneiric Blue Neighborhood that defined Sivan’s past — in his relocation to a new landscape of unabashed revelry and excess, the artist has packed up his electro-pop sensibilities and packed away his poignance.

Yet, by some miracle, it happened. I Killed Your Dog is a marriage made in heaven between the experimental style Cheek is known for and that “basic bitch” aesthetic.

It’s an album of healing — listeners tread through ripples of grief and acceptance alongside Stevens and come to recognize the ups and downs of life in their own ways.

“Fruitland is the name of the street that I currently reside on,” Melchor said, recounting the beginnings of his EP in an interview with The Daily Californian. “I wanted to get as close to home as possible.”

Mesmerizing the audience with both looks and lyrics, the only thing missing was someone to fan her and feed her grapes.

“I just wanted to make whatever the truest form of my second album could be and would end up being,” Montgomery concluded. “[Pressure] becomes an exciting opportunity for a creative rubric.”