Brian Slattery Photos
Midnight Psychic.
Unapologetically pounding drum machines. Guitars and basses suffused with enough effects to meld with the keyboard washes in the background. Vocals floating in a sea of reverb. The sound of darkwave — a morose, sexy strain of music that rose out of punk and new wave in the early 1980s and has turned out to have a persistently long life — washed over Cafe Nine on Thursday night as three bands showed an eager audience how it was still done, four decades in.
Jason Priest, the band’s bio explains, is a “post-punk/synthpop alter ego,” a “British punk rocker who heads to New York City in 1982 on the heels of a brand new record deal, only to spend the better part of the decade strung out on amphetamines and drowning in alcohol. Now back in London, Jason is sober for the first time in years and dealing with an existential crisis, coming to grips with the idea that maybe he’s only a figment of someone else’s imagination.”
The New Haven-based project — led by Antoni Maiovvi on vocals and guitar, with Ross Cross on guitar, Ric Dangers on bass, and Benjamin Klock on synths — hit the Cafe Nine stage first with a set of very polished originals, a strong set of songs with impeccable arrangements. In keeping with the timeline of Maiovvi’s alter ego for this particular band, each song sounded like a post-punk/new-wave hit from the 1980s that was just being rediscovered, and in some ways refreshed, refined. The music made a case for the relevance of the sound of darkwave to today, staying true to its roots without being beholden to it.
If Jason Priest modernized the sound in part by adding a whiff of humor, Midnight Psychic — also from New Haven — took that step further. The duo of Jayson Munro on vocals and guitar and George Moore on bass make “goth rock inspired by abandoned shopping malls, clown paintings and window blinds,” their bio explains.
The music itself, as drenched in the style as Jason Priest was, also had a harder edge. The bass growled, the guitar snarled, the drum machine ground out its propulsive rhythms. The songs had sharper corners. The harsher landscape provided a contrast to Munro’s vocals, which were calm in a way that sometimes suggested serenity and sometimes deadpan. It added a touch of wry humor and plenty of catharsis, especially later in the set, when the songs got downright danceable.
The crowd had grown throughout the evening, so that touring band Widow Rings had an enthusiastic audience for their short, sharp set. Where Jason Priest and Midnight Psychic dispensed with banter altogether, letting the music itself be the way to connect to the audience, Widow Rings — Caleb on vocals, Pez on bass and keys, and Brian on guitar and keys — connected, and fast, through Caleb’s charisma and willingness to say cheeky things. “If you haven’t danced all night and you feel like it, come a little closer,” he said at the beginning of the set. “I don’t bite too much.”
It got more outrageous from there, as the band deployed cascading scales, big dance beats, and synth washes to fill the club. But it was Caleb’s emotional vocals and Pez’s fuzzy yet melodic bass lines, reminiscent of Peter Hook from New Order, that brought people a little closer to the stage. The band’s songs were about bad heartbreak and tortured relationships, yet Widow Rings made that misery sound like a lot of fun — maybe because they made sure the crowd could dance to it if they wanted.