Sadie Besocke photos
Mikaela Davis and Southern Star performing at Space Ballroom.
Hamden’s Space Ballroom ascended into a rainbow-splashed, psychedelic heaven Friday night after upstate New Yorker Mikaela Davis set the scene for a fourth-dimensional funk-folk-country-rock set list — with the help of a golden harp and angelic voice.
Though Davis’ glaringly gilded instrument at first seemed poised to steal the show and audiences’ attention, it was her full band’s collaborative spirit that brought the house down. Davis was joined by Kurt Johnson on pedal steel guitar, Cian McCarthy on electric guitar, Alex Coté on drums, and Shane McCarthy on bass. Over the course of the night, mandolins and maracas made it into the mix.
Mikaela Davis and Southern Star were the third band to fill Space Ballroom with song Friday, alongside New Haven group The Tines and now-Connecticut-based friends The Fivers. Both of the openers announced new music: The Tines revealed that their first full-length album will be out on Aug. 26, while The Fivers celebrated the release of a new album, Time We Share, that same night.
Davis, meanwhile, primarily performed tracks from her debut album, Discovery, which came out in 2018. The sounds she and her bandmates produced were on theme: Novel, innovative, and, at each step, a surprise. When she walked out in front of the audience, long hair floating freely around her face, the stage lights went from red to rainbow.
Trained in classical harp, Davis veered away from plans to perform in a symphon. (Read more about her background in her bio here.) The outcome was a partnership with the Southern Star portion of her band’s title — a few Grateful Dead look-alikes, each one with an original musical voice.
Davis provided some fixed treble pitches that allowed the players to her left to bend and slide notes on the guitar, creating a smooth fusion of melting noises, ideas and themes. The set ranged from hard rock to upbeat country to soft folk.
Kurt Johnson was perhaps the brightest star of the night; Davis seemed to deliberately lay low on certain songs, switching between simple chording and light arpeggios while Johnson broke time in totality, letting loose through winding, multi-minute solos on the pedal steel guitar. (Watch some of that in the video below.) His Southern sound joined easily with Davis’ vocals, which were laced with an indie-folk-country twang similar to Adrianne Lenker and Faye Webster.
Three bands and three hours of music later, the whole crowd was back on earth. But if Mikaela Davis returns to town, it might be worth buying a ticket to learn how some musical spirit from Rochester, N.Y., can fly New Haveners to outer space.