Ian not so Sweet on tuition debt at Nice, A Fest on Friday, 26 July 2024.

The music hits two stages as The Rockwell jumps into the fray with Crystal Ballroom.

The fourth edition of Nice, A Fest unfolded like the wings of a Targaryen dragon atop Davis Square from Thursday, July 25 through Sunday, July 28.

Has it been four already? Yup. And the festival has come a long way since 2021, when it operated under the ONCE banner, and was held as a one-day shindig, with a dozen or so bands, amid the rubble at Boynton Yards.

In 2022, the ONCE banner was swapped out for Get To The Gig Boston, as the carnival relocated to The Rockwell and Crystal Ballroom in Davis Square. The two venues have buttressed the ambition of the organizers for three years now, growing the festival bigger each year with a gardener’s loving touch.

More of everything, more every year.

More music – we’re up to 80 acts in 2024, not counting DJs. Can’t count DJs. More stages – a third stage was added, outdoors, in the Grove Street Parking lot. The weather cooperated. More paeans of gratitude. Feel the love! More free Topo Chico (though, notably, less signature Grillo’s pickle juice mixed-drinks). More visuals from Digital Awareness, killing it as usual.

More vendors, more fanny packs, more ear mufflers for toddlers, more Wizard security, more schwag, more mechanized dill spears, more feeling awkward about using the word ‘nice’ in any context (even fitting ones!), more payment options, more retreads, more stage banter lamenting tuition debt incurred at Berklee College of Music…

And more “local-adjacent” acts. At some point a festival that built itself on the slogan “keep it local” might definitively outgrow its mission statement. If/when that happens, the Venn diagram intersect of people who notice AND care will probably be a very small and inconsequential population of kvetchers. A Nice, A Fest sporting national headliners with no significant local roots would at least carry the distinction of having built its enterprise bottom-up through the local music community.

Contrast with the top-down approach: secure the out-of-towner Big Names, then fill out the rest of the bill with virtuous and hardworking local acts. Cinderellas on the Orange Stage.

Or maybe the festival will downsize if it returns next year?

But that’s all speculation about what might be. This is a recap about what was. So let’s get to it.

Friday

Ian Sweet / Hannah Mohan / Pet Fox / Mallcops

Alright Thanks / Axel & Lolo / Bus Crush / Chris Walton / Coco Smith / Hereboy / Impossible Dog / Jobie / Jake McKelvie / Little Fuss / Noble Dust / Tiberius / TIFFY

A four-day fest is like waking up a sleeping giant.

The alarm clock can ring on Day 1, but we’re going to need a second to rub our eyes and scratch our ass before we’re up, alert, and ready to take a math test.

Thursday’s schedule was still shaking the sleep off, but by Friday we’re headed to the kitchen to make breakfast. A giant breakfast. For the giant. Don’t lose track of the extended metaphor.

Star attraction of the sideshow: a mechanical riding bull in the shape of a jumbo-sized Grillo’s Pickle. Free ride too. No fussing with quarters. And if you think that people have too much pride and dignity to hop on the back of a mechanized pickle in public, you don’t understand human nature. The crowd just needed to warm up to the idea.

Two stages, only one opener: Coco Smith at the Rockwell scooped Impossible Dog at the Crystal Ballroom by 15 minutes on the schedule. No obvious perks or bonuses for opening, and some would typically consider it a little extra burden, like a comedian opening up a cold room. As a rule, though, the opening sets at the festival were decently stocked. Not the deserted wastelands that you see in small clubs across town on quiet nights. People paid more than a penny for admission, so show up early and get your money’s worth.

Coco Smith played a song called “Albatross,” which is a bird that’s been getting absolutely fileted by underground guitar music lately. Cola penned an ode to the wayward winger. Locals Sorry Ma! took their own swings at the wings. Does anyone have anything good to say or sing about the bird?

Here’s a couple of appreciation paragraphs for a couple of instruments that veered off the beaten path of your usual rock n roll trio of bass, guitar, and drums. A member of Jobie’s band worked a violin into the mix.

You know, that isn’t the most radically exotic alternative, since it’s still a stringed instrument that operates in many ways like your average guitar. “Radically exotic” is not a requirement, however. What matters most is the sound of it, which helped the set separate itself from the sonic textural rawk monolith dominating most of Nice.

The second curveball instrument on the day was genuinely off the beaten path: a cajón (or something akin to it?) operated by one of the musicians in the five-piece Axel & Lolo. The percussive instrument is basically just a box. I’m sure it’s a high quality box, expertly manufactured by box master craftspeople hailing from generations of the box building tradition, because the box on stage had the sweetest sound during the set. A soft kind of shaggy thud, which fit the music just right. Axel & Lolo is driven chiefly by the gentle harmonies of the eponymous vocal duo, and you don’t want overly strident percussion muscling out the sunny vibes.

Some Nice veterans returned in 2024 under their previous names, others returned with new projects. Olivia Sisay, who performed in 2022, returned with a new band called Bus Crush. If I heard right, it’s their first gig? Let it not be said that the festival organizers don’t have confidence in the artists on the bill. No warm up gig required? Just straight out of the box, plug & play.

As the evening picked up steam the initial baseline level of missing out, which comes with all fests that run concurrent sets on different stages, started to kick in. The plus is that you’re rarely at a loss for music right in front of your nose, and the fragmented audience tends to minimize overcrowding at any single location.

Compare to Solid Sound, which ran a three-day music schedule with no overlapping set times – massive crowding at every performance, even the ones that might have been sleepy appearances with a smattering of overflow from the main stage gig otherwise. It’s kind of stressful.

Nice, A Fest navigates its way past that pitfall, but yeah, you’re going to make choices. Noble Dust and Chris Walton for a folk explosion at the Rockwell instead of hanging at Crystal Ballroom? Tiberius and Little Fuss at Crystal Ballroom instead of hanging at the Rockwell? Tie goes to Tiberius for trotting out a Korn cover.

A solid string of rawkers at the Rockwell starting at 8PM, including Hereboy (which was sounding like a poppier, punkier version of Dead Gowns, if you can imagine such a thing), Alright Thanks, and TIFFY, whose new EP 2 has been making the rounds among music writers in the local press. Not at Hump Day News, though, because we tend to just write up tracks lately. Not enough writing personnel to devote to EP and LP reviews. If you want to change that, contribute! Anyway we wrote up one track off the new EP, which really zipped.

Shout out to Hannah Mohan for working some call-and-response audience participation into her twangy alt folk rock set at Crystal Ballroom. That’s at least one strategy for getting the crowd to focus. Maybe it was the time of day, or some strange alignment in the stars, or just a bunch of people arriving for their first day of the fest and still trying to orient themselves. The mood at the Ballroom seemed particularly diffuse and distracted during Mohan’s set. A lot of side talking. Like they always say at The Mad Monkfish, the venue “isn’t a church or a library,” but you should still keep your brilliant verbal commentary to a dull roar, and maybe focus your gaze in the general direction of the stage once in a while. But hey, it’s a free country, so they say.

Extra points to Mallcops for always pulling a great crowd.

Red hot kudos to Jake McKelvie for bringing a sound that was different on the day, and all the more refreshing for it: a kind homegrown, working class, Irish pub rock feel to his set. The singer-songwriter played as part of a four-piece, spinning out narratives that told real stories about real human beings doing approximately human being things. Alt country with a little bit of honky tonk swagger in the black box theatre below Davis Square.

Two stages means two closers, though Ian Sweet’s set at Crystal Ballroom extended deeper into the night, so you could catch all of Pet Fox’s set at the Rockwell before heading over for one last stop on your Friday night journey.

What sort of stop was the last stop? A local-adjacent stop, with Sweet currently residing in California, but having passed through the Berklee College of Music meatgrinder. Her main stage banter takeaway? Berklee tuition debt is “not worth it.” But to be fair to Berklee, you can rack up that debt at most schools, pursuing other majors, and still find yourself struggling for decades after graduation. 

That’s not just Berklee, that’s higher education in general. We should have all majored in Monkey Knife Fighting at International Waters Polytechnic instead, and we’d be better off.

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