Brian Slattery Photos
Chris Brunetti of Trench CT.
Rage found an outlet in voices and beats as three Connecticut bands — Remedies, Trench CT, and Psycho Brat — took to the stage at Cafe Nine on Wednesday night. With newspaper headlines full of political tension, the bands’ sets of hardcore and punk made a place for release.
“This is our second real show ever,” said David Shapard of Remedies. He then offered a caveat for those who might have been expecting ska: “I invented a word for our genre that had the letters s‑k-a in the middle of it and it all went downhill from there,” he said. “If you’re here to skank, we can call it a two-step.”
Shapard’s deadpan banter was a perfect foil to the high energy of the hardcore band, as Remedies — Shapard on vocals and guitar, Zach Placzek on bass, and Kolby Evans on drums — tore through a set of originals that found Shepard unleashing sludgy guitar, Placzek rumbling on bass, and Evans pounding out the beats. The immediate accessibility of the energy drew people in, which gave time to appreciate that Remedies was actually writing long, complex songs full of tempo and texture changes, riffs and moods.
“If you can’t tell,” Shapard said, “we don’t know when to stop writing a song.” But the audience was there with Remedies working through their material. If people had come to Cafe Nine with something ailing them, Remedies was the cure.
Next up was Trench CT, from central Connecticut, there to ramp up the energy even more with another blistering set of hardcore. Chris Brunetti on vocals, Billy Perry on guitar, Martin Sirois on bass, and Matt Casella on drums were a tight unit, with Brunetti’s growling vocals cutting though the squall. Perry’s guitar was like an alarm, delivering wake up calls all throughout the set, and Sirois and Casella created a freight train of a rhythm section — especially Casella, whose explosive energy filled the club whether he was pounding out breakneck two-steps or going big, heavy, and slow. A few people occupied the space in front of the stage, and soon the floor was a mass of thrashing limbs while heads bobbed in the back.
The band excelled at switching up beats. The music suggested chaos, things flying apart, anger, but there was more to it than that; there was joy in the catharsis of it. Brunetti made that clear toward the end of the set when he said, with great sincerity, that the band was “so happy to be able to play” that night. Someone on the floor did a cartwheel.
Last on the bill was West Haven’s Psycho Brat, with Ava Robertson on vocals, Holden Newton on guitar, Aloysuis Rebeiro on bass, and Brady Gingell on drums. The band started its set with a straight-ahead banger that announced a change in sound for the night. “If you were expecting to hear another hardcore band, that is not what we do,” Robertson announced. “We’re an emo, punk, riot grrrl band, so if there are any girls in the audience, come up front, because we’re for you.”
Psycho Brat’s sound was built on a squall from Newton’s guitar, driving bass and drums from Rebeiro and Gingell, and Robertson’s voice careening over the top of it all, singing, chanting, barking, and sometimes squealing the words. In a way the night built toward her performance; she made rage the most fun.
Toward the end of Psycho Brat’s set, Robertson announced the band would perform a song they recently released titled “Fuck 47.” The song, she said, was “about Donald Trump, and in case you can’t tell by the title, we don’t really like him.”
Psycho Brat launched into the song, with Robertson spitting out the lyrics. “Take from the poor / give to the rich / six bankruptcies / for a ‘great economist,’” the song began, building explicitly to the final verse: “I’ll scream until I have no voice / I’ll scream until my lungs collapse / I’ll scream so you might fucking hear / I’ll scream so you might fucking care / rapist in office / taking our rights.” It received the heartiest applause of the night.