Quinn Turlington, a.k.a. Sinecera, gave the crowd at Cafe Nine on State and Crown a sly grin.
“Greetings,” he said. “I’m going to play some music now.” His funny, casual demeanor was a ruse.
The New Haven-based musician — “I’m a band of one right now,” he said — writes songs that are anything but casual. Sinecera easily filled the club with his plaintive voice and an electric guitar dialed in just right so that Turlington got a clean tone when he kept it quiet and and grittier, distorted sound when things got loud. The songs themselves left ideas about verses and choruses behind; instead, they proceeded from one musical idea to the next, so that they began in one place and ended somewhere else. As often as not, Turlington harmonizes with himself, picking out lines on the guitar that weaved around the melody he sang before dropping away to give the song some atmosphere.
In between the songs, Turlington made joke after joke. He told a story about wearing overalls to work, which excited him because he didn’t have to wear a belt, but then the straps of the overalls chafed. Then he tried wearing pants without a belt, but they fell down. “I thought,” he said, “a good compromise would be just to eat more food.”
But the songs themselves dug deep, creating a short set full of emotion — a fitting way to set up Evelyn Gray as the evening’s next performer.
Brian Slattery Photo
“It’s really a gift to be here under the light of the full moon,” Gray said near the beginning of her set, a group of songs that showed the songs on her recent EP were no fluke. With deft effects-pedal work and precise, forceful guitar playing, Gray built each song from simple, spacious phrases until some of them sounded oceanic. For all their emotion and composition, they were vehicles for Gray’s voice, cooing closely in the microphone one minute and standing back to howl the next.
“I’m tired all the time,” she sang, having turned her guitar into something resembling an organ. She didn’t sound tired. She sounded strong, affirming, even triumphant. In between she dedicated songs to people who were going through something. People “who are on a journey of learning to care for and love themselves.” She spoke with an understanding of that journey herself, but also suggested a way that it can end. Sometimes, she said, it seemed “you can never get to the other side of the road.” And then some days you looked around and realized “you were always on that side of the road.”
Shy started her set by picking out the theme to Jurassic Park until someone in the audience noticed.
“Dinosaurs!” the audience member said, with the appropriate air of mock wonder. She thanked Sinecera for starting off the evening and then paused.
“Where’s Sinecera?” she said, pretending to look for him in the audience as Turlington grinned, now seated behind the drum kit. Like the Sinecera set, Shy’s time on stage was marked by joking around between songs that found the band as tight and dynamic as ever, as the bass calmly held down the center while Turlington found a new, tasty way to approach the rhythm every minute and Shy found increasing ways to make the loud moments louder, the quiet moments quieter. The band was so tight that some of the song’s stops took the audience by surprise; there was a moment of silence, and then applause.
Halfway through her set she explained that a friend in the crowd was on the verge of making her laugh. “Sorry if I’m smiling a lot,” she said. There was no need to apologize.