Pile celebrates the All Fiction record release in Somerville on Friday, 3 March 2023.

Amherst’s Mal Devisa opens with a solo set on electric guitar.

A little history related to the Armory, that funky looming casbah on Highland Avenue in Somerville. (Thanks, Arts for the Armory!)

“The Armory was built in 1903 by George A. Moore to house the Somerville Light Infantry of the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia. For nearly seventy years after that, it also housed the Massachusetts National Guard. For the last thirty years, the building was used for some community events but largely sat vacant until the State of Massachusetts decided to sell the building in 2004.” 

Like many aged and aging armories around the country, the Somerville location has been repurposed to serve peacetime ends. It’s not as if America suddenly lost its appetite for armed conflict, though, fighting WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and a host of conflicts in a “forever war” stretching across the globe since 1903. America’s all-volunteer fighting force still demands bases for training and recruitment. So if not Somerville, then where?

All over. War’s a big business. You can find recruiting offices for various branches of the military in Malden, Cambridge, Woburn, Lexington, Melrose….it’s endless. And that’s just for recruiting the entry-level employees.

If you’re more the executive type, you’ll be calling the shots at Hanscom. The command headquarters for all the National Guard forces is in Hanscom, Massachusetts. When Governor Healey needs to quash imminent revolution, she’ll get on the horn to Hanscom.

If you’re more the middle manager type, you’ll be administrating at one of the training centers around the state. The largest training center is Camp Edwards, which occupies 15,000 acres of the 22,000-acre Joint Base Cape Cod in Buzzards Bay. It’s the largest training center in the Northeast, never mind Massachusetts. The next largest training center in the Bay State is Camp Curtis Guild in Reading, which sits on a mere 680 acres.

Though Massachusetts is still very much in the business of war, cities and towns can manage their resources how they please. In 2004, the Somerville Armory entered a new phase of its existence: 

“The historic armory was purchased by Joseph and Nabil Sater, in collaboration with Highland Realty Trust, in April 2004 from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for $2.6 million. Owners of the successful Middle East music club in Central Square and patrons of the arts, the Sater brothers successfully embarked upon a vision to create a community arts center for the City of Somerville.”

Not successful enough, apparently! Because the Saters were looking to displace the cultural arts usage with “a tech company or small-scale manufacturer” tenant in 2021. In fairly short order, the Mayor of Somerville and the city council moved to acquire the property through eminent domain, offering the ownership a $5 million bond. Maybe not the payoff the Saters were looking for after developing the property for almost two decades, but still a neat $2.4 million profit over their original purchase price.

The city made the move in order to preserve “a permanently affordable arts space.” ‘Permanent’ is a long time, but so far, so good. The reason your Pile ticket was affordably priced – at least one of the reasons – is because it’s been underwritten in part by the taxpayers of Somerville.

Money well spent!

Mal Devisa

Mal Devisa opened in the airy confines of Arts at the Armory. She performed as a solo electric guitar act, weaving postpunk textures with singer-songwriterly riffing.

The crowd might have expected a song or two off her latest LP For Daisy with Honey: 4U and maybe a few from kiid. Extra points for making a cavernous room feel like a cozier fit. Shout out to the #HampshireCollege tag on the Bandcamp page.

The Amherst-based artist played to a full house, though there’s something about the space that dwarfs even a capacity crowd. The main hall is large, and feels even larger than it is. Why is that?

Credit the massive exposed ductwork. Most concert halls of the same size would put in a false ceiling to conceal the mechanical guts, thereby shrinking the actual lived space of the building. But the Armory wasn’t originally designed as a concert hall and military men don’t sweat conventional aesthetics. The end result is a quirky venue with a certain industrial glamor, but it can be an imposing room for a solo set.

Pile

Only one opener for Pile. Who needs extra appetizers when the main course is so appealing? The three-piece arrived in Somerville for a double whammy: an All Fiction record release show and a kind of homecoming. A nice one-two punch. 

Pile is right now one of the premier post punk bands in America, adding vitality to a corner of popular music that, to paraphrase Glenn Branca, is always on the verge of death.

Whatever Pile’s ultimate legacy, the band will always have a place of pride in the rock pantheon for a certain subset of local elderly millennials who grew up with them. From Boston to Beyond, as the band continues on its globe-trotting tour. But if you order Pile’s latest album All Fiction, the tenderly-packaged record still lists a Massachusetts return address in the upper left corner.

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