Imagine someone handed you a blender, put Radiohead’s OK Computer on one side and a Phish live recording on the other, and said — now make something beautiful. That’s the experiment Weird Phishes has been running since they emerged from Cambridge, MA, and they’re bringing it to Putnam Place in Saratoga Springs on Friday, May 15.
The five-piece — Alex Glover on guitar and vocals, Josh Knowles on violin, Pat Pingeton on bass, PJ Holaday on drums, and Derek “D-Rokk” Dupuis on keys — doesn’t just slap one band’s lyrics over another’s chord changes. They rebuild. A Radiohead song filtered through Phish’s improvisational spirit becomes something looser, warmer, stranger. A Phish tune refracted through Radiohead’s melancholy gets darker, more searching, more alive. Relix called them a band that “successfully fuses the work of the groundbreaking experimental indie band Radiohead with the music of Phish.” Live for Live Music described their approach as “both imaginative and principled.” Both are right.
These are not beginners. They played back-to-back afterparties at Phish’s 2019 Fenway Park run. They were the last band to perform at Nectar’s in Burlington before the pandemic shutdown in March 2020. Last November, they did a complete live reading of Radiohead’s The Bends at The Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge. This spring, they’re touring with Night Zero — a jam supergroup featuring members of Dopapod and Twiddle. They’re building toward something, and a Friday night at Putnam Place is exactly the right room to feel it.
Support comes from Strange Machines, a Boston-based quartet blending funk, livetronica, rock, and reggae into a fluid live show that has shared stages with The Disco Biscuits, Pigeons Playing Ping Pong, TAUK, and Kung Fu. They’ve played Putnam Place before — March 2024 — and their latest album Playing With Fire is worth putting on before Friday night.
The show is 18+. Doors at 7:00 PM, music at 8:00 PM. Advance tickets are $18; day-of-show is $23. Don’t sleep on this one — get your tickets now and catch Weird Phishes doing something that shouldn’t work as well as it absolutely does in the Capital Region.