Brian Slattery Photos
As the temperature outside dropped to feeling downright wintery, Space Ballroom in Hamden on Wednesday was filled with warmth, as indie-folk favorites Darlingside, with Field Guide opening, created a night of hope and good cheer for a packed house of fans ready to receive it.
Field Guide, a.k.a. Dylan MacDonald, opened the evening with a solo set of originals. “Thanks for lending me your ears for a minute,” he said. “You’re in for a good show,” he said of the upcoming headliner, “but you know that already because you’re here.”
The Winnipeg-based musician then showed himself to be a deft songwriter, an agile singer, and an understated guitarist who knew how to vary the sound with simple arrangements and choices that were never simplistic. His plaintive, conversational songs were often about heartbreak, leavened with humor and humanity. “Look, I understand,” he sang. “When we fell out of love I hurt you bad / but I don’t want to be a memory that makes you sad,” he sang of a former lover that, he hoped, could perhaps somehow remain a friend. The lyrics may have addressed the hurt, but the music suggested that maybe, just maybe, things would work out all right.
In between songs, MacDonald carried the audience along with self-deprecating humor. Earlier, he admitted that he “sauna’ed,” so “getting on stage I was nervous because I thought I might be too chill.” As the set went on, he introduced “my friend Cedric, the drum machine,” motioning to a box sitting on a chair next to him. at the end of the song, he motioned to Cedric as if the machine itself should take a bow.
He also remarked on the cold, explaining that he had talked to his mom on the phone and they figured out that it was currently warmer in Winnipeg than in Connecticut. But “you got to go out when you can,” he said, nodding to the near-capacity crowd; clearly a few hundred people agreed.
The Massachusetts-based Darlingside — on this tour, singers and multi-instrumentalists Don Mitchell, Auyon Mukharji, and Harris Paseltiner, supported by Molly Parden, Deni Hlavinka, and Benjamin Burns (regular member David Senft doesn’t tour with the band) — then delivered a set of lush, uplifting music punctuated by banter that swung entertainingly between heartfelt and self-consciously deadpan.
“We have waited a very long time to be back together with real humans,” Paseltiner said, explaining that they had released two albums — Fish Pond Fish and Everything Is Alive — during the pandemic and were thus in a sense touring both of them. As performers, they excelled live at the sound created on their albums, of lusciously blended voices and intricate musical textures, all to produce songs of hope and unabashed beauty that sounded bigger even than the six-piece that they were onstage.
The seriousness and earnestness woven into the music was counterbalanced with off-kilter banter that outlined the obvious deep friendship among the bandmates. Mukharji introduced each band member along with their seltzer preferences. Paseltiner expounded on a sign in the Space Ballroom bathroom that read “don’t be gross: wash your hands.”
“I started to feel guilty for not yet doing something I wasn’t planning on not doing,” he said. “I started to doubt my intentions. Had I really been planning on it?”
“When you spend a lot of time with your bandmates, you get to know them very well, and that becomes a problem,” Mukharji said in response to this. He paused. “I enjoyed my days off” earlier in the week, he said. Everyone laughed.
In the middle of the set, the band left the stage to perform in a tight circle amid the crowd. With no one in the audience speaking, their collective sound filled the space as if they were amplified. Musically, it was a particularly intimate, delicate moment in an evening that had been full of them already. Afterward, before they returned to the stage, Mitchell explained that “one thing that’s awkward about coming out in the crowd is that I’ve been making knowing eyes at someone in the crowd from the stage, and then realized it was not that person.” The room erupted in laughter again. “I still appreciate you,” he said to the smiling stranger.
The music only got warmer as the set went on, the applause heartier. Darlingside ended their set to full-throated cheers, like a hot fire against the cold.