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Hop Along leads local Made in America lineup

Call it Made in Philadelphia.

Frances Quinlan of Hop Along, with bandmates (from left) Mark Quinlan, Joe Reinhart, and Tyler Long, is looking forward to playing Made in America. She's been acclaimed as one of rock's best voices. (Shervin Lainez)
Frances Quinlan of Hop Along, with bandmates (from left) Mark Quinlan, Joe Reinhart, and Tyler Long, is looking forward to playing Made in America. She's been acclaimed as one of rock's best voices. (Shervin Lainez)Read more

Call it Made in Philadelphia.

The fourth annual Jay Z-branded Labor Day weekend music festival known as Budweiser Made in America gets under way Saturday on the Parkway.

For the first time, both days sold out in advance. Credit for that goes to the drawing power of Beyoncé, chart-topping Canadian R&B singer the Weeknd, a strong hip-hop bill, electronic dance music standouts Bassnectar and Axwell Ingrosso, and pure pop acts such as heartthrob Nick Jonas.

This year's boffo box office has been achieved despite the absence of a rock act on the scale of previous big names Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, or last year's closer, Kings of Leon. The closest things to marquee rock headliners are Pacific Northwest alt-rockers Modest Mouse and Death Cab for Cutie.

But does that mean this year's slate of guitar bands is totally lame? Not at all. That's because there's a clutch of high-quality homegrown rock acts, all garnering considerable national attention for the formidable Philadelphia scene.

The list of local participants includes Waxahatchee, the Katie Crutchfield-fronted band that in the spring released the justly praised Ivy Tripp, the follow-up to her 2013 breakthrough album, Cerulean Salt. Alabama-born Crutchfield - whose identical twin, Alison, is a Waxahatchee touring member as well as frontwoman of her own Philly band, Swearin' - is a paragon of a local scene peopled by a growing number of formidable female songwriters (such as Los Angeles émigrés Girlpool, whose Cleo Tucker is Crutchfield's West Philly housemate) and bands that have relocated to the 215 from around the country.

Also on the list of local Made in America participants are darkly moody rockers Creepoid, whose Cemetery Highrise Scum came out this summer, and Strand of Oaks, Timothy Showalter's band, whose emotive HEAL was a highlight of 2014.

(There are other 215-connected acts on the bill, as well, including genre-blending pop artist Santigold, electro dance duo Marian Hill, and, of course, feisty North Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill.)

But the Philadelphia indie act generating the most excitement and having the biggest breakout 2015 is Hop Along, the rock band led by stop-you-in-your-tracks singer and songwriter Frances Quinlan. They perform on Saturday.

The band's riveting new album, Painted Shut, which makes good on the promise of 2012's Get Disowned, has been winning praise for Quinlan's knack as a narrative songwriter who doesn't tread familiar lovelorn ground. (Two songs draw inspiration from the life of New Orleans jazz man Buddy Bolden, and "Horseshoe Crabs" is based roughly on cult songwriter Jackson C. Frank).

But what really commands attention is Quinlan's throaty, consistently surprising vocal delivery, which inspired New York magazine site Vulture to ask: "Is This the Best Voice in Rock Music Today?"

One day last week, it was the voice that answered the phone in Los Angeles. Less raspy, raw, and unconstrained than in performance, Quinlan had just done some sketches from a perch at the Griffith Park Observatory (she's a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore), and willingly submitted to a phone interview in the midst of a SoCal vacation.

The band had played dates in and around the FYF Fest in Southern California earlier in the month - one hyped them as "mixtape nostalgic yet blogger contemporary" - and were on a break before heading home to Philadelphia.

The 29-year-old singer grew up in North Jersey along with older brother Mark (who plays drums in Hop Along) before moving to Perkiomenville in Montgomery County when she was 10. She now lives in the Olde Kensington section of Philadelphia.

"Ecstatic!" is how she describes her feelings about being on the Made in America bill. "We're playing with Beyoncé," she says with faux matter-of-factness. "I'm excited, I can't wait to go. It's a cool thing [but] a little intimidating," she says.

"Mostly I go to shows at Union Transfer and Johnny Brenda's," where she'll play a solo set on Sept. 10, opening for Dinosaur Jr.'s Lou Barlow, who by chance was on the same L.A.-bound plane she was on when she got the offer from the Fishtown club. "Isn't that cosmic?" she asks. "I said, yes, I have to do this."

Hop Along are capable of rocking out with careening energy, and do so at several junctures on the thorny, satisfying Painted Shut. But Quinlan is a folkie at heart. When she started out in the mid-00s, influenced by the Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, and Ani DiFranco records she grew up on, she recorded under the name Hop Along, Queen Ansleis. (Hop Along is a high school nickname given to her "because I would just ride behind and not really pay attention to what was going on.")

"I was of greater conviction then. It's like Bob Dylan: 'I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.' I was very, very serious about making a low-fi album. I had just heard Kimya Dawson and Bright Eyes," for whose Saddle Creek label Hop Along now records.

"Before that, I just really liked songs - you know, I liked records by Radiohead and Bob Dylan, but I didn't think about how they were made at all. The texture of those low-fi records at the time really jumped out at me."

On Painted Shut, Quinlan and Hop Along convey a sense of immediacy in full band, rarely predictable arrangements that display her skills as a teller of often not comforting tales. "Powerful Man," an album highlight, is about witnessing a father beating his son on the street in Baltimore when she was 18 and feeling shamed by her inability to intervene. "I didn't want to make myself out to be a hero," she says, explaining why she struggled over writing the song.

It's also an example of intense subject matter - "Pretty horrible stuff," Quinlan says - being told via light-hearted music.

"At first, I thought we couldn't get the story across unless the music was really heavy," she says of the song, which she recorded with guitarist Joe Reinhart and bass player Tyler Long, plus producer John Agnello, who's worked with Philly acts such as Kurt Vile and Free Energy. "But once we made it poppy, it made sense. Pop music can be a great vehicle for anger, which is really weird. Like 'Beat It' - that's a pretty angry song."

Quinlan's songs have a lot of words, but not as many as they used to. An avid reader - she's currently into Norwegian novelist Tarjei Vesaas' 1968 The Boat in the Evening and objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky - she's aiming to say more with less.

"That's the thing about being a folk singer and then being in a band. You can step aside a bit and let the music speak a little more than the lyrics. When I first started to play, I was a pretty rudimentary guitarist and the words did most, if not nearly all, of the work. But I've really started to embrace saying as much as possible with as little as possible. Conciseness."

The album's last track, "Sister Cities" offers such a cathartic, charged ride, you would suppose the band considered moving it up on the track list, so no- attention-span listeners would be sure to hear it.

In fact they did, but Quinlan says she was adamant about the song sequence of Painted Shut, which begins with the early-morning eye-opener "The Knock."

"That's a very important thing to me," she says. "A person should be led through an environment and an experience. You have to listen all the way through. I think a great record is one that people listen to from beginning to end, and don't have songs that people can even imagine skipping.

"I don't know if we've got anywhere close yet to making one of those. But that's what we always try to do."