Read any of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books? Truly, they’re amazing and you should give them a read. One of the storylines in Book 2, Carl’s Doomsday Scenario, finds the titular character fighting the remnants of an evil circus — Grimaldi’s Traveling Circus, to be precise. After catching their Oct. 29 performance at Crybaby in Oakland, I’m convinced the Bridge City Sinners would have been the circus’ house band.
Originally scheduled for the UC Theatre in Berkeley, I’m damn glad I happened to be scrolling Instagram and saw the notice the show had been moved. I parked Shaka on the street in downtown Oakland, grabbed my camera from the back and took a deep breath. The Phoebe Bridgers show the night previous had been emotionally exhausting, so I was hoping for some serious party vibes with this one — my bet is the Sinners are the band to bring to the raucous!
Shawn D’Amario had just started his set when I walked in and, armed with a whiskey and soda, I made my way to the stage. Holy shit, that dude looks just like Aaron, I thought to myself, so much so that I immediately texted Aaron telling him I’d found his doppelganger on a stage in Oakland. Aaron took this personally and texted me back 15 or 20 minutes later noting the dude even had the same brown pants Aaron is often seen wearing. A mix of blues styling with southern gothic storytelling, just him and his guitar filled the stage as he worked the crowd. Great opener.
Liam St. John took it from there — yes, that St. John, of The Voice fame — closer to the Sinners’ own lane, and he set the table nicely. In addition to supporting the Sinners on their Trick or Treat tour, St. John has a regional run through the American South lined up for January before heading to Australia in March.
Then the Sinners. If you haven’t had the pleasure: the Bridge City Sinners are a Portland string band that plays like they’re trying to raise something from the dead. Dark folk, graveyard jazz, Appalachian death folk, blackgrass; nail down the genre at your own risk. They put on a helluva show, all schlock and camp and grinning menace, and Libby Lux works a crowd like she was born mid-pit. At one point she introduced the band as traveling t-shirt salespeople with a music side hustle — which is both part of their appeal and their longevity; any successful grassroots band knows they live and die by what they can sell at the merch table.
They tore into “Break the Chain,” the lead single off their most recent record, In the Age of Doubt — a banjo-driven stomp about finding a little hope when everything feels like it’s closing in.
It was an all-ages room two days shy of Halloween, and it showed. Costumes everywhere, and more children than I expected at a show by a band with “Sinners” in the name and a song called “Virgin Sacrifice” in the catalog.
Which brings me to the moment I keep coming back to. Mid-set, some kind of kerfuffle broke out in the crowd — a kid caught up in it somehow — and Libby dead-stopped the whole show. No song, no banter, just a hard halt until the grown-ups sorted themselves out, with a pointed word about pulling that bullshit with children in the room. The camp has a conscience. She can whip a room into a frenzy and freeze it cold in the same breath, and watching her do the second one told me more about this band than an hour of the first.
The whole night something kept tugging at me, and about halfway through I placed it: the last time I felt this much camp, this much pure fun, was catching the Cramps in Detroit in the early 2000s. Lux Interior’s bunch built an entire church out of horror-movie schlock and rockabilly sweat, and here, two decades on, was a Portland folk band carrying that same torch without ever needing to name it.
Here’s what made the night land the way it did, though. That Phoebe show the night before had been a very different animal. That one was catharsis — a room full of people grieving together, holding each other up, walking out lighter than they came in. The Sinners were the other pole entirely: a loud, campy, defiant night of fun, and that pole matters every bit as much as the holy one. In days when it feels like everything is lined up to beat you down, a night like this is its own kind of medicine. Phoebe reminds you you’re not alone in the dark. The Sinners remind you that you can stand in that same dark and howl at it and laugh. You need both.
Following their run through the west, the Sinners takes their troupe east for a handfull of dates in Texas, the year rounding out with a NEw Years Ever performance at the Rosaland in front of their home crowd.
So yeah — if an undead circus ever claws its way out of a Matt Dinniman novel and goes looking for a house band, I know a Portland string band that’d take the gig. Bring the kids. Just mind your manners — Libby’s watching.
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