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Mark Oppenheimer |
Jun 10, 2024 9:54 am
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John Kritzman Photo
Bleachers.
Milling around the floor-level seating area at the Westville Music Bowl on Friday night, I had no particular idea what I was in for. I had come to review a show by Bleachers, the six-piece band conceived, fronted, conducted, and in every way emceed by Jack Antonoff, the producer and songwriter responsible for approximately 63.4 percent of the songs inflicted on me by Top 40 radio, including large chunks of the catalogues of Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, Kendrick Lamar, and Carly Rae Jepsen. He is also an alumnus of the band Fun. (period intended), for whom he co-wrote the unbelievably catchy 2012 song “Some Nights.”
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 10, 2024 9:41 am
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Eleanor Polak photos
Lynette Devore and Lisa Bellamy Fluker (below) at Riverfest.
The June sunlight sparkled off the smooth waters of the Quinnipiac River beside the Quinnipiac River Marina in Fair Haven, where people of all ages gathered to participate in the Quinnipiac Riverfest this Saturday.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jun 10, 2024 9:34 am
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Robert Eddy Photo
Composer Gwyneth Walker.
Sunday afternoon saw a wealth of appreciative music fans fill Woolsey Hall for the New Haven Chorale’s season finale that was also part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. Its program filled heads and hearts with a resplendent array of selections that focused on fond memories, gratitude for those memories as well as the present moment, and an offering of comfort and peace for those of us in the here and now, even as we grapple with grief and pain.
Wally's Teo Hernandez, Lucas Hernandez, and Alex Blair perform at WNHH FM.
“Everything’s meant to be broken / Everything’s meant to pass …”
Alex Blair wrote those words back in junior high or high school; he’s not sure of the exact year, but he knows his heart was broken.
A decade or so later, he was singing those words with brothers Teo and Lucas Hernandez, sliding into pitch-perfect harmony they’ve honed since those school days.
After singing the chorus to the song, called “Hiding Behind The Moon,” Blair, on his Ovation guitar, and Teo, on his Martin, added a newfound twist: a chromatic descent influenced by Blair’s newfound interest in Bossa Nova music.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 5, 2024 9:19 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Chloe.
Chloe, of the Hartford-based band Cvmrats, told stories about deceased friends and the difficulties of being mistaken for a train hopper, but everyone at Cafe Nine on Tuesday night knew the reason she — and all of them — were there. As the State Street club listed it, “on behalf of Chloe from Cvmrats, we are hosting a benefit show for her mom. All door proceeds are going to help support her current financial hardships and make a tough situation into hopefully something better.” As Chloe had posted on Instagram, the proceeds would “help my mom get back into stable housing” and “a better situation in general.”
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 3, 2024 8:16 am
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Eleanor Polak photo
Aly Maderson Quinlog and Ty/Tyasha Pace at Pride Center's Zine Fair.
The New Haven Pride Center at 50 Orange St. was decked out this Saturday with colorful flags and even more colorful artwork.
Magik Press, a micro-press and arts studio run by Aly Maderson Quinlog and Ty/Tyasha Pace, was hosting its first-ever zine party and punk show. It was an event, the two stressed, about community, and the community was out in full force, from the vendors showcasing their creativity to the buyers eager to share in it.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 3, 2024 8:14 am
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Eleanor Polak photo
Ponybird & Co.
The music room in Never Ending Books at 810 State St. was cluttered but homey. A collage of brightly-colored abstract art and painted records decorated the walls, which were lined by well-worn musical instruments. It recalled a grandparent’s house, a place where one might go to hear wise truths and rambling stories. On Friday night, two groups of musical storytellers gave the audience just that.
Messer Chups performing this weekend in New Haven.
Spooky sounds emanated from Cafe Nine Saturday night. Instead of sending shivers up spines, it kept a crowd smiling and shuffling from side to side for a nonstop hour.
Armando Acevedo clicked on a file from his phone. He unrolled a taped-together 10-page scroll. He started rapping the printed lyrics, summoning the insights of a noted 20th century Swiss psychologist married to 21st century beats.
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Eleanor Polak |
May 28, 2024 8:32 am
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Dan Soto performs "Deep Dark Heart."
Best Video Film & Cultural Center was alight on Friday night with movies, music, and general merriment. Three acts — Dan Soto’s Natural Fool, Katy Pinke, and Sallow Friend — performed live music to a crowd of 30 to 40 people, sandwiched together between shelves of video tapes. Before the night was over, the walls would seem to shake with the combined sound of instruments, vocals, and thunderous applause.
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Brian Slattery |
May 24, 2024 9:26 am
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Allie Bee stood in front of an admiring audience in the downstairs space of Westville’s Third Space. Tracks they’d made themself played behind them as they took their time unfurling melodies they’d written on bass. The first one, groovy, insistent, they said, was called “Wayward Giant.” The second one, hazier and jazzier, was called “Blue Moon,” named after a smoothie of the same name that they’d made at work.
“Inspiration comes in weird places,” they said.
An enthusiastic voice came from the back: “Yeah it does!”
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Brian Slattery |
May 21, 2024 9:16 am
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City of Meriden.
New Haven-based artist Michael Miglietta has a visual style that leans into the surreal and the cosmic, creating dizzying, shape-shifting images with bold linework and vivid color. Under the moniker Parlay Droner, he’s also an experimental musician, exploring the harsher edges of sound. For a show of his artwork at the Cellar on Treadwell in Hamden, however, he faced a more pragmatic problem: “What do I have to do to get people to see a great band from Ireland on a Monday night?”
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Brian Slattery |
May 20, 2024 9:06 am
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Still from video for "My Holy Shrine."
A chiming guitar, light percussion from bongos, an ambling bass, a laconic vocal describing a trip down a city street evocative enough that one can visualize the dim sulphur lights, shadows shortening and lengthening as the voyage proceeds. The journey begun, a wavering, fuzzed-out guitar strides onto the scene, taking its time to develop its ideas. The second guitar switches to a fuzz of its own, and together they take the song farther out. Another vocal break, this one taking things in a more surreal direction. “The sun shines on the moon,” two voices sing, and the band keeps going, keeps searching.
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Brian Slattery |
May 17, 2024 9:42 am
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Trashing Violet; "Put your earplugs in deep."
Marisa B. of Trashing Violet was nearing the end of her set, but in another sense, she and her band were just getting warmed up. “Put your earplugs in deep. You’ve been warned,” she said, as the band tore into its most visceral original yet, a song that started and ended with screams that the audience couldn’t help but respond to in kind.
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Dereen Shirnekhi |
May 16, 2024 12:07 pm
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In the back room hookah lounge of the Mediterranea Cafe, Love n’Co gave a sneak peak into their musical take on chocolate and hope, a week before it lands on the band’s first-ever EP.
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Marisa Torrieri Bloom |
May 10, 2024 8:47 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
Corpse Flower at Cafe Nine.
Grace Yukich picked up her first acoustic guitar in high school, in Opelika, Alabama, in the mid 1990s. Women like Alanis Morissette and Courtney Love ruled the burgeoning alt-rock music scene. But Yukich didn’t personally know any non-famous women, let alone moms, who also played rock music — and certainly none who wanted to start an all-woman punk band.
So, perhaps subconsciously, Yukich put guitar playing on the back burner to pursue other things —theater, a PhD in sociology, marriage, and, in her 30s, a move to Hamden, and the birth of her daughter.
Things seemed to be going fine, until early 2020, when her marriage started falling apart.
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Brian Slattery |
May 9, 2024 9:19 am
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Ceschi (center) at Cafe9 Wednesday.
Hip hop and folk punk came together Wednesday night at Cafe Nine to offer stories of persistence, hope, and detective work as DJ Halo, Tommy V, MJ Bones, Indigaux, MC Homeless, and Ceschi performed for an enthusiastic audience in a show organized by Ceschi.
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Karen Ponzio |
May 6, 2024 7:57 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
The Decemberists' Colin Meloy ...
... and opening act Ratboys, at College St. Music Hall.
The Decemberists brought May to a magnificent start on Saturday night when they returned to College Street Music Hall for the fourth show of their 2024 A Peaceable Kingdom North American tour.
Fans filled the room from floor to balcony, up the stairs and to the edges of the stage barrier, to bask in the multicolored hues of the lights and lofty sounds of some of their favorites, mixed in with new material from the band’s aptly titled upcoming album As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again.
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Karen Ponzio |
Apr 29, 2024 9:42 am
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"Addiction."
The arts and sciences, the movement and stillness, the rhythm of breath and step: on Saturday afternoon, all came together in the performance space at St. Paul and St. James Episcopal Church on Olive Street for Creative Circle, a delightful dance and music performance that saw two dance companies — the New Haven-based kamrDANCE and the New York-based SYREN Modern Dance — engage each other as well as the audience in their latest works in progress.
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Dereen Shirnekhi |
Apr 26, 2024 10:05 am
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Dereen Shirnekhi photo
Waxahatchee at Toad's Place.
“I’ve been yours for so long / We come right back to it.”
It was a refrain I’d heard maybe hundreds of times at that point, the croon of Katie Crutchfield’s voice and the banjo backing her committed to memory. But Thursday night, as I heard it live and sang along with a crowd filling up Waxahatchee’s sold-out show at Toad’s Place, the song felt new.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 25, 2024 8:52 am
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Sketch Tha Cataclysm at Three Sheets.
“Hello several people, rap professionals, and various cool people,” said Sketch Tha Cataclysm from the Three Sheets stage, as he and fellow New Haven hip hop stalwart Mo Niklz hosted a group of touring artists from Chicago for a night of high-energy indie hip hop.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 22, 2024 1:11 pm
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Brian Slattery photo
At the New Haven Composers Spotlight at NXTHVN.
Composer and violinist Alyssa Chetrick was taking a solo as part of her vertiginous piece, sardonically titled “Equilibrium.” If some of the previous passages had offered a sense of calm, Chetrick was now going for chaos, spurring the ensemble around her to join her. Her phrasing pushed the musicians around her to dig deeper into the music she’d written, as if they were looking to break it. Would they?
Sam Carlson broke a string as he tuned up his Guild D‑50 acoustic guitar to perform live on radio. But no worries — he had a backup Guild M‑20 with him as well.
