As the host of Live & Local on 97.9 The Hill, I get the chance to meet lots of great local musicians and bands that I’d otherwise never have encountered. We’ve got a terrific music scene here in Chapel Hill-Carrboro — to quote the Yardarm, “There’s too many bands in this town!” — and with all that talent around, it can be hard to stand out.
Blue Cactus doesn’t have that problem.
The first time I heard Blue Cactus, they weren’t Blue Cactus yet. They were a larger band, Steph Stewart and the Boyfriends, playing Festifall 2013 in support of their debut album “Over the World Below.” Even then, in those early days, the spark was there; their song “Wake Me Carolina” still blows me away today.
But that was just the beginning. A couple years later, Stewart and Mario Arnez broke away and rebranded as Blue Cactus, and it’s been all uphill ever since – first with a self-titled debut album in 2017 that drew great buzz, then blowing up last year with a wildly popular anti-Trump single, “Finger on the Button.”
And then in May, Stewart and Arnez put out their best record yet, maybe the best thing our local music scene has gotten all year: their second album, “Stranger Again.”
Blending classic Americana with dreamy psychedelia, “Stranger Again” opens with a bang, or rather a twang: a slide-guitar riff followed by Stewart’s plaintive voice delivering the most archetypically country of opening lines, “Today was the day he left you.” That opening track, “Blue As The Day,” is great in itself; on most albums I’ve heard this year, it’d easily be the highlight. Here, it’s not even one of the album’s four singles.
What actually is the highlight, then? There are several strong candidates; different people will have different favorites. Personally, I go back and forth between the title track, “Stranger Again,” and the lead single, “Come Clean” – great companion pieces, both about characters who realize they’ve gone astray in their relationships and their lives, who want to hit rewind and go back to the days before things went awry, but aren’t sure how to do it. (Which is about as timely as “Finger on the Button,” now that I think about it that way.) Maybe I prefer “Stranger Again” because it’s the more hopeful of the two, about a couple who can still recapture the magic: “Don’t it feel like the first time with you holding my heart?” In “Come Clean,” by contrast, the relationship is past salvaging and Stewart’s long past giving up: “Every man’s heart is made for breaking, and now I done the damage too.” (On the album’s rocking third single, “Rebel,” Arnez takes the lead with a similar lyric – “And I know I can’t go back the way it was” – but here the sentiment is a bit more optimistic. I think.)
We were fortunate to have Blue Cactus playing live here at University Place back in June, barely a month after the album’s release, to kick off our Live & Local Live! summer concert series. It was the first time I’d seen a full live show in well over a year, and they delivered a great one, closing out their set with “Radioman,” another one of the album’s highlights. (That song actually predates the album; they released it as a single way back in 2018.) And they also dropped a hint that the best may be yet to come: my favorite song from their set was a brand new one, “This Kind of Rain,” that still has yet to be recorded or released. (“I don’t know/if I’m getting better/or I’m getting worse…”)
Even now, though, Blue Cactus have emerged as one of the top bands of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro music scene. That scene has produced a lot of great stuff this year – new music from the Connells, Watchhouse/Mandolin Orange, Southern Culture on the Skids, and more – and even amidst all that, “Stranger Again” might be the album of the year so far.
You can purchase “Stranger Again” at this link.
Sponsored by Blue Cactus.
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