“Isn’t it nice to have friends who help you with stuff?” Charly Bliss frontwoman Eva Hendricks laughs before urging the crowd to chant bandmate Dan Shure’s name after his humbly fixing a technical issue with Eva’s guitar. This proved to be a theme throughout the tight hour and fifteen set at Boston’s Royale music venue on Friday night: both the unending graciousness of true, selfless friendship and the divine comedy of a guitar not working for a band that has been relentlessly grimaced at over the last five years for ‘not using enough guitars’ which they rightfully roll their eyes at as a united front. Guitars and love abound to those paying attention.
It’s a long running joke with the band, all in good fun, but also a joke they aren’t afraid to direct toward these ‘critics’ who can’t seem to let the band evolve without reminding them that they love their debut album Guppy more than any other. It’s boring nostalgia but the band spins it into comedy gold. I heard my first Charly Bliss track in 2018 when an algorithm tossed Black Hole my way and I picked it up like a twenty on the sidewalk wondering why no one else was grabbing for this gold. Take me on a date! Take me anywhere, was I insane? Purple in the face, laughing all the way home, Eva Hendricks shrieks on Black Hole’s chorus and I was hooked immediately. I’d let her take me anywhere, no matter how insane.
Which is why when the band started rolling out 2019’s Young Enough, my first thought wasn’t where are the guitars? but instead Holy shit, I didn’t know they could get better. They had me at the spectacular bridge to single Capacity which goes:
I was raised an East Coast witch like
Doing nothing's sacrilegious
Triple overtime ambitious
Sentimental, anxious kid
It’s the kind of sharp, cheeky songwriting that made me fall in love with Guppy in the first place, but with this new, darker sound that hinted at something sinister and twisted lingering beneath Hendricks’ sticky sweet delivery. The dark synthpop of Young Enough definitely bleeds into their latest record, Forever, though they mostly trade in the darkness for wide-eyed, get-your-sunglasses levels of light. If Young Enough was about reckless, destructive love, Forever is about love imbued with an unabashed care, looking the past mistakes and those hurt by them in the eye and saying thanks for sticking around even when I was fucking awful. I’m still learning and I still love you.
“It’s been ten years since we met, just nineteen when you saw me,” goes Nineteen, the first single from the record. Cooing these opening lines on stage backed by Eva’s brother Sam on piano, my concert-going friend gave me a knowing jab in the side and a look that said it all. Almost ten years to the very day of the concert I met my all time best friend Kelly the week we moved into the same college dorm. We were seventeen when we met, not nineteen, but there was enough supplemental serendipity to brush that discrepancy off.
The first Charly Bliss song I sent Kelly was their Young Enough b-side, Threat. I could have sent her anything from their discography and it would have clicked but this one practically grabbed me by the face and said send me! send me! and it went over well.
We’re on the Mass Pike, and though he’s not the one,
he makes me cum while driving left-handed and far away from here
It’s the kind of song that makes you laugh and also sort of picks at your chest like, Jesus Christ I know this feeling and it’s so uncomfortable, how does she make it sound so fun? Kelly quickly fell down the Charly Bliss rabbit hole and it wasn’t long before we were playing Chatroom at every gross pregame in the kitchen while downing shots of raspberry Smirnoff. We went crazy for that shit no matter how many times we heard it. Leading up to the show, we continuously referred to it as the James & Kelly Chatroom Live Experience and though they saved that banger correctly for the encore, the rest of the show was no less fun or relentlessly energetic.
I thought to myself listening to Guppy in full for the first time ‘oh god yeah, this woman is for sure named Charly Bliss. Do you hear her cracking, sparkling voice? That is a Charly.’ I’d find out later that Charly Bliss is simply the name of the band, not a moniker for frontwoman Eva Hendricks though a case could certainly be made that her rockstar persona both on the songs and on stage is a sort of angling toward that bliss that is the music’s namesake. When Hendricks comes out on stage in an all green sequined corset with a massive tutu and sash thrown fashionably over the shoulder you know exactly what you’re about to get and Hendricks delivers. She screams. She throws herself around the stage like a tantrum. She grins so big like she might just open up and swallow the audience whole. She fumbles a few lyrics to the new songs and laughs at herself. ‘Wait, was that right?’ There’s no disappointment on any front, it's all part of the fun, the mess that makes them so real.
When Hendricks asked bandmate Spencer Fox for his favorite part of this new Forever era, he said That people finally get to hear what Charly Bliss has always been trying to sound like. The band has cited several inspirations for this record from the 1975 to Paramore to MUNA, which I hear most clearly on In Your Bed, my personal favorite from the record. But I can’t help throwing Carly Rae Jepsen’s hat into the ring. Sonically for sure, in the EMOTION style saxophones on Nineteen and Last First Kiss, which really could be a Carly song in another timeline. But also in Hendricks’ particular pop sensibilities and explosive stage presence. You can just fucking tell she’s having fun getting dressed up in big outfits and thrashing around the stage and isn’t that all we really want in a performer? When they have fun, we are given permission to have fun, too.
The crowd was pretty eclectic, hard to pin down; lots of older guys with graying beards who were probably there for the guitars and surely got their fill with Eva, Dan and Spencer shredding from start to finish; a healthy helping of queers with dangly earrings and patterned button downs, the kinds of gays who will always be drawn to a campy, poppy frontwoman like Eva Hendricks, myself being one of them (though I personally dressed in as many bright colors as I could find, pink and purple and blue to match the shimmering maximalism of the new record. I would like to be commended for this); plenty of girls dressed a little bit grungy in tattered plaid with dyed hair and combat boots to fit the 90’s rock revivalism that Hendricks gripes over on the stellar, brutal track I Don’t Know Anything. This was one of my favorites to hear live, maybe even because of how the all-important guitars pounded the crowd relentlessly then cut out just as quickly, a rhythm that turned the room electric. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t some people who were definitely holding their bodies back the way people at concerts always do but Kelly and I were tucked into a pretty healthy bubble in the center of the crowd where movement was religion. When Eva Hendricks asks if you’re ready to dance, you better be already dancing.
There were five years in between Young Enough and Forever in which the band was segmented and separated, like most people, by that pesky little pandemic. They spent much of that time physically apart from one another and though Hendricks has described it as a very tumultuous time for her, it also heavily inspired the ferocity with which they tackled this album and the subsequent tour. Coming back to make music after so much time away, there was nothing to hold back, the love between bandmates renewed tenfold after coming so close to giving it all up. The knowledge that this incredible, honest band with so much chemistry and palpable love for one another almost dissolved was a live current under the whole show. It is a miracle that our artists get to make the music they do in a time where joy has to be practically clawed for, where touring live music was almost eradicated and continues to be so difficult for even well known artists to make financially feasible.
What’s incredible about this band is that they fought hard for this and so they sort of don’t care if it sounds ‘corny’ to love your friends and be loud about it. From the woman who once sang I laughed when your dog died ; I bounced so high I peed the trampoline ; I wanna see you stripped down naked, I expect nothing less than bold-faced honesty and the love Charly Bliss carried into that room was infectiously honest. When I think about us, it gets so loud, ‘cause I know now I was always waiting for you, Hendricks sings on my favorite of the singles, Waiting For You. The first handful of times I listened to that song it made me cry consistently and embarrassingly. When it came out, I was heavily reflecting on the past decade of my life: ten years in one city, ten years of ugly growth, painful mistakes that are frankly still hard to look at, and the people that are still by my side in spite of those mistakes. Pull me out so I don’t fall apart. Singing this shit with a band formed by invisible friendship molecules, with my closest friend who has pulled me out time and time again, was cathartic to say the least. Blissful, to be more accurate.
The encore closed out the show with the anticipated electronic pop banger Chatroom, which I danced off my gay little ass to. Every red light interruption, left for dead, goes the bridge which has certainly taken on different meaning with every stop and stutter between then—2019—and this moment getting to play for a room full of people looking for joy without the harsh undercurrent of shame. Charly Bliss tells you without telling you: fuck the shame! Love your friends and say it out loud! It’s cool to be a sweetheart, actually! And, most importantly: are you fucking listening? These are guitars, baby!!!
Whether you came for those harsh guitars from Guppy, the gripping angst of Young Enough or the explosive joy of Forever, what you get is exactly what you paid for: Charly Bliss, a band deeply in love with one another and the heart-bursting songs they make together. Get into it.
This was fuckin killer ❤️