Brian Slattery Photos
Miguel Loor.
Three musical acts brought calming sounds on a warm fall evening to Cafe Nine on the corner of State and Crown, leaving smiles, deep breaths, and camaraderie in their wake.
New Haven-based indie rock musician Miguel Loor started off the evening with a set of just him and an electric guitar. He explained that he usually played with a band but “they couldn’t make it tonight.” He paused.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m really psyched to play a solo show.”
He was ready, too. With his guitar drenched in reverb and just enough crunch, he made an ocean of space for his voice to swim in. In such a sparse, spacious musical setting, Loor made deft use of dynamics, sometimes dropping his guitar to a textured crunch, sometimes bringing it up to arcing flourish of distortion, while he let his voice swoop, dodge, and croon through it all. The crowd was with him from the start, staying silent through every note and breaking out in hearty applause at the end of every song.
If there was a problem with his set, it was that it was too short. “I’m getting all warmed up and I have just two songs left,” he said. The crowd seemed to share that sentiment, even as it was also the classy thing to do, to cede the stage to the touring acts. Loor ended with the audience wanting more, and with the room made ready for more music.
The upstate‑N.Y.-based Emmett Kai, on vocals and guitar, then took the stage with a five-piece that included keyboards, guitar, bass, and drums.
“You feeling good?” Kai asked the audience from the start. “I’m not trying to control you. I’m just asking.”
“Please control us,” someone shouted back from the audience.
That amiable humor permeated Kai’s set as he unspooled a collection of originals soaked in a laid-back 70s soft rock vibe. Bass and drums were smooth and supple, with enough drive to make it danceable had anyone decided to do so, carbonated with bubbling keyboards. The two guitars, meanwhile, laid down the outlines of the songs’ harmonic structure, or added fluttering textures, but largely left the songs feeling sparse and tight. At one point Kai turned up the distortion on his guitar because “I heard you like noise shows around here” — not an unfair characterization of the New Haven scene — but the added edge didn’t break the spell. Kai thanked the audience for being there for his first Connecticut show. He thanked Cafe Nine. He spoke of how he preferred the East Coast to the West Coast, where he was from. Smiles spread on faces as people listened; then they cheered each song.
“It does get hot in this little joint, huh?” Kai said toward the end of his set. He was talking about the actual temperature in the room, but it was also a reminder that even a chilled out vibe can create some heat.
The New York City-based Habe finished up the evening by returning to the solo format Loor had used: just vocals and guitar, both awash in reverb to make a sense of space and, in Habe’s case, to create a sense of intimacy. Habe’s music was the quietest and most calm of the evening, as he sang in hushed voice or falsetto, and as often as not kept his guitar to a delicate whisper. These were songs almost to snuggle by.
In between the music, Habe leavened his banter with dry humor. Noting that he had forgotten to write out a setlist, he asked if anyone in the audience knew his music. A woman in the front did.
“Okay, what do you want to hear?”
She requested a song from early in Habe’s catalog. He grimaced. “I don’t know how to play that,” he said. The crowd laughed with him.
“Anything off of that EP, then,” his fan ventured.
“Huh. I don’t know any of those,” he said. More laughter, genuine and kind. He smiled and explained that he would sing her a brand new one instead; maybe she would like that. Judging from the audience reaction at the end, it seemed everyone liked it.
Habe’s searching music and lyrics were just the right end to the evening. He introduced one of his last songs by explaining that he wrote it in college, “trying to figure out who the hell I was,” he said with a self-deprecating smile. He explained that, at the time, he assumed that he would have an answer to that question in a few years, perhaps by graduation. With each passing year, however, the song gets a little richer, because “it turns out it’s not true” that one ever really figures it out (is it?). Habe ended his set with that question mark. His music, however, suggested that maybe the search was really all we needed.