Brian Slattery Photos
June of 44.
Early in June of 44’s set, after a strenuous number, two sound tech men rushed onto the stage to reattach drummer Doug Scharin’s drum mics. Vocalist and guitarist Jeff Mueller turned around with a smile on his face. “He’s hitting the hell out of them,” he said. To Scharin directly, he said, jokingly, “what are you doing?”
“He’s rocking out,” said someone in the audience.
Rocking out was, in short, what June of 44 and The Van Pelt had come to the State House on Wednesday night to do. The two bands intersected at the Ninth Square club following similar long trajectories. Both band had long initial runs in the 1990s, releasing a slew of albums and doing a lot of touring. By the early 2000s both bands had gone quiet, only to reemerge in the last decade, with new material and new tour dates. Both had big plans for 2020 that were interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. This particular June of 44 State House show was rolled from 2020, to 2021, and then rolled again to Wednesday night. For The Van Pelt, the show marked their return to live performing in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. For June of 44, it meant the beginning of a short East Coast tour, in preparation for touring internationally in the near future, as the band has in the past.
So in a night short on banter with the crowd, there was still a palpable sense of catharsis from both musicians and audience, a thrill at playing and hearing live music. The Van Pelt — Chris Leo on vocals and guitar, Brian Maryansky on guitar, Sean Greene on bass, and Neil O’Brien on drums — started off with a short drum roll and a downbeat hit from all four band members that suggested they’d all taken a deep breath together before they hit their instruments. As the song built its sound, Leo chanted into the microphone. “In your eyes I see a past,” he said. “In mine, what do you see? And why would you even want it?… We’re old souls, in different epochs.”
In song after song, The Van Pelt created a sound that felt monumental in scope yet created an intimate space for Leo’s vocals. Greene’s and O’Brien’s rhythms felt deep, full, and wide, while Leo’s and Maryansky’s guitars created lines and textures that Leo’s vocals could dart in and out of. The lyrics mixed past regrets and longing with a sense of wry humor, the new songs right at home with older material. Building on past successes, the set also showed that The Van Pelt still had a lot more to say.
June of 44 — Jeff Mueller on vocals and guitar, Sean Meadows on vocals and guitar, Fred Erskine on bass and occasional trumpet, and Doug Scharin on drums — raged across the stage from its first number. The pairing with The Van Pelt was inspired, as both bands sought to use rock instruments to make broader sounds than rock bands usually made. But where The Van Pelt had an ultimate sense of settledness, even peace, to its music, June of 44 was about being unsettled and restless. The songs were often built on a series of small yet intricate repeated melodic ideas, dense rhythms, and dramatic dynamic shifts, as very sparse openings grew quickly into rumbles and roars, harmonically complex and often straight-up dissonant. The overall effect was hypnotic, as one song melted into the next, drones gave way to spiky riffs from the guitars and blasts from the drums, and the music rose and fell, rose and fell.
In its quietest moments, one could hear, in the silence, that the audience was rapt. This made for a raggedly delicate moment near the end of the set, in the song “Cardiac Atlas,” that felt simultaneously the most fragile and most intense.
“He makes camp Just above your heart / Your heart / With rhythm, with rhythm / With rhythm, with rhythm / He makes a fire here / And warms the giant sky inside your chest / He makes a fire here / And warms the giant sky inside your chest,” Mueller sang. The music faded and faded, until he was singing off-mic, directly to the completely quiet audience. For a breath, there wasn’t a single sound in the club. Then someone cheered, and June of 44, in response, roared into its next song.