LIVE REVIEW: Benches in Cambridge, MA (08.10.25)
Last Sunday night, Cambridge’s Sonia Live Music hummed with Y2K nostalgia. Under flickering purple and green lights, the crowd was a sea of JNCO jeans and oversized jorts as the first strum of fuzzy electric guitar crackled through the speakers.
benches made their way to Sonia as a stop on their North America twentytwentyfive tour, which commenced in the wake of the May release of their EP “Kill the Lights.” The San Diego band consists of lead singer Anson Kelley, guitarist Evan Ojeda, drummer Ethan Bowers, and bassist Charlie Baird. Established in 2014 by then-middle-schooler Kelley, the group has since honed an alt-rock sound inspired by bands like Arctic Monkeys and The Strokes, which they have dubbed “Bench Rock.”
Supporting band Pleasure Pill, also hailing from San Diego, opened with explosive energy and a garage grunge aesthetic. Lead singer Jonah Paz delivered a passionate vocal performance that matched the band’s ever-expansive sound, marked by a “Teenage Dirtbag” whine. Paz’s shaggy haircut swung as he picked up maracas and shook them into the microphone with verve. Through heavy distortion and palpable angst, Pleasure Pill set the 2000s-tinged tone of the night.
benches launched into their set with the title track of their new EP, “Kill the Lights,” interwoven vocal and guitar melodies fizzing to life beneath the strobe lights. Kelley closed his eyes as the chorus surged, disappearing into the lyrics “it’s just a fantasy.” The red obscured the band’s features, transforming physical reality into the “fantasy” of romantic disillusionment for the audience to experience. “I Don’t Make Me” washed the room in red light as the beat picked up. Odeja traversed the stage, jumping to the music, and the crowd followed suit.
Throughout the show, the band delivered instrumental variance across the songs, partaking in a type of dance as their instruments drifted between different sonic spaces. In “Mephisto’s Waltz,” Kelley’s raw vocals and Ordeja’s bright guitar tone blended haunting melodies to create a sense of tension. In the subsequent “Reach,” Kelley’s voice hovered between melody and drone throughout the verses, allowing for the more dynamic guitar part to lead the listener into the crescendo of the chorus. Other times, like in “Common Sense,” the drums took on the role of carrying the shifting tone, especially during the bridge when the rest of the instrumentation fell away. This interplay of focus gave way to a more texturally interesting performance.
One of the highlights of the show was benches’ ability to build cinematic arcs into their songs. “Naive” utilized dynamic shifts to expand on the emotional storytelling of the lyrics, driving home their meaning. The mumbled, subdued verses built a foundation for the distorted desperation of the chorus to explode with sparking clarity, as Kelley sang with his heart on his sleeve. “Red Handed” also featured particularly intense swell in its bridge: the quiet desolation in the repetition of the line “I miss hanging out with people I miss” surged into a hurricane of drums and guitar. The drama of these shifts offered the audience the thrill of sonic whiplash and emotion that was hard to pass up.
While benches developed an immersive sound, there were times when I felt their musical garage-fuzz vibe overtook vocal intelligibility to a distracting degree, diminishing the impact of the performance. The band’s lyrics are rife with emotional depth and poetry, and I wished that Kelley’s vocals weren’t quite so buried behind instrumentation and production. The most impactful songs utilize music and words in tandem to communicate meaning. Ceding the clarity of one to the vibe or aesthetic of the other is, in my opinion, a cop out. If you are going to say something, say it with conviction.
Still, the band’s capacity for musical storytelling was apparent. benches performed with passion and control, the audience captivated by their sweeping, turbulent dynamics. The crash and swell of their music, colored by 2000s rock references, took a familiar sound and brought to it fresh resonance and perspective.
Featured image by: Attiken Vega
