After a day of driving heavy machinery, Joe Ballaro plugged in his bass, and the show began.
“We are lost and a long way from found,” sang J. Russell, lead singer of the local band Split Coils.
Backed by steady strumming and an easy rhythm, Russell kicked off the second installment of WNHH FM’s new livestreamed concert series called Tuesday @ The Mediterranea Cafe, where local bands perform in the Italian-Middle Eastern restaurant-hookah bar located at 140 Orange St. (A video of the performance appears above.)
“What’s life got on the jukebox?” he asked, eyes closed.
He was singing “Earth and Dust,” the lead track on the band’s 2019 EP of the same name. “Without you by my side, there’d be nothing but earth and dust.”
The Split Coils, made up of Russell on vocals and guitar, Ballaro on bass, Jon Scerbo on drums, and Mike Sembos on guitar, brought their wide-open-highway, Americana sound to Mediterranea’s backroom hookah lounge. Defiant and earthy and guitar-forward (yet still whole), the band rocked on.
The Split Coils are a Connecticut band through and through. While they take pride in the fact that most members hail from the Naugatuck Valley — except for Sembos, who is from New Haven — they’re a fixture of New Haven’s live music scene, even calling Cafe Nine their “home base.”
In an interview between songs, Russell spoke about their lives working for a paycheck during the day and working their songs after hours.
“When you’re 45 and work a full-time job and play in like six bands, it’s important that the people you play with are on the same page and don’t give you hate for cancelling last minute because your kid threw up Twizzlers,” Russell said. Not only are the guys his “best friends; they’re also my bandmates.”
The band, which cites musical inspirations like Willie Nelson and Archers of Loaf, is made up of veteran performers. The members all work on multiple projects (Russell himself began his career in the early 2000s emo band Hot Rod Circuit), and they’ve each been making music for a long time. They began performing around town as the Split Coils in 2017. Seven years later, they’re still going strong.
On Tuesday, the band was missing co-vocalist and percussionist Katelyn Russell, whose smooth voice cuts into the band’s rugged sound in their studio and other live performances. I wondered how that might impact the tenderness their music maintains.
It wasn’t a problem — between the lyrics and the sound, the sweetness came through, even amid the grit.
Five years after the release of their first EP, the band might be ready to record their next project soon. They performed two of their new songs during Tuesday’s set — the up-beat “Cynical” and the slower, heavier “Change Your Mind.”
They ended their four-song set with “Wandering Wild,” a return to their EP. Between Sembos’s riffing and Scerbo’s drumming, held together by Ballaro’s playing, the number is fun, though the lyrics aren’t entirely positive.
“I know we’re dying inside, let’s take to the night,” Russell sang. “It’s a beautiful feeling, living life with no fear.”
“There are such amazing bands in New Haven, and the younger bands are just killing it,” Russell said toward the end of the show. He’s been lucky enough to have been around for a few of the scene’s different phases; the support it offers has stuck through.
They have another show at Cafe Nine on Friday, April 26. Until then, they’ll keep living their full lives outside of playing music, finding time for it around work shifts and family time.
If your band is interested in performing on Tuesday @ the Mediterranea Cafe, reach out through the “Email the Author” form above.
