The three headed monster rises at Nice Fest on Saturday, 27 July 2024.

Grove Street Lot adds an outdoor stage to the mix. Three stages! Outrageous!

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.

Saturday

Vundabar / Palehound / Bay Faction / Pile / Grass Is Green Ovlov / Gymshorts / Divine Sweater / Hush Club / Layzi

A Day Without Love / Aubrey Haddard / Barefoot Young / Burp. / Cheer Camp / Doss / Eph See / Goodkarma / Happy Just To See You /  Hell Beach / Invisible Rays / JVK / Little Low / Makeout Palace / MK Naomi / Mom Rock / Nurse Joy / Ohio State Fair / Otis Shanty / Pink Slip / Sidebody / Supermarket Parking Lot / The Calendars / The Dead Friends Club / Tyler & the Names / Viruette

Saturday was the day. The perilous moment when the multi-headed Cthulhu of Nice Fest reared up from the dark depths in full ferocious fettle, each head tilted back, eyes dim, as a triple-throated cry exploded into being like a triumvirate of Wagnerian Preludes, mocking the boundaries of existence and non-existence, spilling over like a briny froth loosed from Cosmic Grail.

3 days of Nice Fest (so far)!

3 stages!

3 headliners!

333: the Mark of the Half-Beast! Lucifer divided by two! Satan multiplied by .5!

The bulk of bands playing the fest tuned up to perform on Saturday, whether it was at The Rockwell, Crystal Ballroom, or the new outdoor stage at Grove Street Lot. 35 bands in a single day, devoured by Nice Fest, absorbed into the schedule like a herd of sacrificial bulls passing along the esophageal tracks of the triple-throated Cthulhu. A hunger for bands without bounds. Will the bloodthirst of this primeval monster outside of time ever be quenched?

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.

Spotted: Wizard Security. Every local’s favorite security squad was on hand in full force, vested in their iconic yellow tops. Chief wizard Jeff Freedman mobilized his team in his usual laidback manner. Very hands off, which works just fine with the mellow Camberville crowds.

And what’s the latest status update from the Gofundme organized to build Jeff “Wizard” Freedman a bronze memorial statue? After a good initial burst of publicity and enthusiasm for the project, public support, measured in donations, has slackened. The last donation was made a year ago. We’re at $2,836 (on 67 donations) raised out of a $75,000 goal. As the Magic 8-Ball might say, “outlook not so good.” These crowd-sourced and -administrated projects are hard enough to pull off when you have the funds, never mind when it’s a struggle to hit your funding goals.

Look up the Robocop Statue project in Detroit – funds raised relatively quickly, starting in 2011, but took forever to build, and they still haven’t planted the finished product anywhere. (On the other hand, Jeff’s likeness isn’t owned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer).

Saturday kicked off with the first set of the day at the new outdoor stage, Eph See, who arrived five-deep and played some pop/rock off their forthcoming album. Also a shout out for Eph See’s previous album girlhood. The five-piece waved its magic wand to turn the parking lot into a festival atmosphere. Asphalt radiating heat in high summer is a tough situation. Never ideal. But judging from the crowds that swelled to fill the space later in the day, the crowd just made it work by dint of sheer enthusiasm.

Tyler and The Names launched Saturday at The Rockwell. The five-piece rocks a kind of gonzo schtick, whose goofball antics might trick you into thinking they don’t know how to play their instruments. Don’t get tricked! They mostly know how to play their instruments, mixing Roadhouse-house band swagger, with Christian revival tent energy, and Bob Dylan meets Bruce Springsteen-delivery on the vocals. Extra points for the keyboardist climbing all over his keyboard like a monkey in a zoo.

Doss followed Tyler’s set. Pristine pop sounds. Is that vocalist the guy from Winkler?

Did you catch A Day Without Love down below? I’m looking back at my set notes and all I wrote down was “car needs gasoline, a sing-along piece” and I’ll be damned if I have any idea what it means. Maybe the band needed some gasoline money to get home. Maybe they orchestrated a sing-along number with the crowd refrain talking about how a car needs some gasoline. It’s not the most impassioned lyric, but it’s relatable, and the most important aspect to sing-along numbers is that people are actually singing along. What they’re singing about – the theme or subject matter – is a distant second concern.

Enough with the basement dwelling – a proper fest is about moving among the abbondanza of offerings. Off to the Crystal Ballroom for a change of scenery. The sparkling airy white abode above Somerville Theatre, stocked with merch tables, free Topo Chico, and a mechanized rodeo pickle.

Surf punkers Hell Beach have a new album coming out called Beachworld. They’re really not messing around with the focused branding. The band put out great sound, and got at least some of the pit moving, but damn if they don’t look a little out of place on a raised dais. Just a touch too formal and high-falutin.

When you’ve seen some of these bands play local dives, like Hell Beach at Silhouette Lounge, it’s a bit of a code switch to see them perform on a raised platform, at a spot with professional lighting, superior sound, and clean bathrooms. Crystal Ballroom doesn’t have that divey grit, doesn’t want it, which is all for the better, but you do lose a certain je ne sais quois rarely achieved outside of venues without stickers on the bathroom walls. It takes all types. Extra points, as always, for the keytar.

Viruette coming on strong with the saxophone during their set. Rock sax, making a comeback.

Band, performance artists, and printing press collective Side Body (sidebody? Side body? Sidebody?) were seeing each other on stage (and at all) for the first time since their record release party two months ago. They all took the summer off. Which is a fun and refreshing notion that is difficult to not endorse. We should all look into this “taking time off” concept.

Do you remember the old New England Patriots slogan for one or another of their championship years: “No Days Off!”

What the fuck was that supposed to mean? And supposing you could divine the meaning of the words, would you lustily chant them like some masochistic schmuck vibing on their own exploitation? Of course, you need to take days off, and there’s no heroism in grinding yourself into a fine paste at the workplace. Some bands keep grinding after an album’s release, though, scheduling a tour to promote what’s just dropped. That’s cool too.

The rock n roll quartet Barefoot Young was young, not barefoot.

Remnant Brewing posted the following blurb about the band playing the 6PM slot at Crystal Ballroom:

Otis Shanty is a dynamic and whirring four-piece rock band from Somerville, Massachusetts. Sadye Bobbette, Ryan DiLello, Julian Snyder, and Jono Quinn met at school in Upstate New York and wrote the band's debut EP "Space For Good Things" from a cabin in Otis, Massachusetts. Two years later, the band released Suite 33, a "dorm room homage" said Sound of Boston who noted the Somerville arrivals "possesse[d] a musical prowess that stretche[d] far beyond the campus."

I shouldn’t throw stones in glass houses, but “whirring”? Like helicopter blades?

Writing on art is truly a thankless task. Whether you’re John Ruskin or some beautiful schlep trying to juice the SEO for your craft brews. Not because there isn’t plenty of gratitude within the local community of art and artists. Underground music is full of polite young men and women, raised by good parents, with good teeth, who understand the value of the gratitude discourse and trade heart emojis like bitcoin. Write a few words on local art by local artists, and watch your cup runneth over in apprishiation, along with the occasional “never come to my shows again.”

The truly hardened asshole on the scene, though, is the art itself. The canny shapeshifter, who receives all comers in stony silence. You can write the most trash, gutted, soulless, corny, imbecilic homage to an album or track, or you can pen a masterpiece of art criticism. The art itself indicates no preference. Why bother? It all comes out in the wash.

Sometimes you miss a gig, like I missed all but the last five seconds of the Nurse Joy gig at The Rockwell, and have to piece together context clues to figure out how it went.

One big clue: the massive glut of human bodies packed into the room. The energy in the air was palpable. Palpable, I say! You can always tell a gig went well based off the hum of the crowd right after the set wraps, everyone looking at each other, their eyes alight with that “Did you just see and hear what I just saw and heard?” Nope, I didn’t.

Although I did see Mae Flux at Notch Brighton last year, and I’m not entirely convinced that Mae Flux is not the same band as Nurse Joy, albeit different by a few turns of the Rubik’s Cube.

Bands now and then shoot themselves in the fucking face with bizarre grossout band names like Diarrhea Planet. Gross. Can we just call them DP instead? Probably not an improvement. The four-piece pop punkers Cheer Camp covered a track by DP at their Nice set. A track called “Ghost of a Boner.”

If you’re calling your band Diarrhea Planet, you’ve got to keep the chuckle train rolling with song titles too. Or else people will start to focus too much on your band name. Which is Diarrhea Planet. Shout out to the vuvuzelist in the crowd who was coming alive on the refrains.

Double shout out to Goodkarma, a trio of young musicians who probably consider Diarrhea Planet “dad rock” if they’ve heard of DP at all.

From “dad rock” to Mom Rock at the Crystal Ballroom. The gender flip-flop is a reliable way to engineer new band names on the spot. Soccer Mommy over here, Soccer Dads over there. Hockey Moms over here, Hockey Dad over there. Why not. The banjo picker from Sweet Petunia highlighted the three-piece Mom Rock in some of the promo that Nice manufactured for itself in the leadup to the fest. It’s usually a good tipoff to find out what bands other bands are listening to. I mean, sometimes they’re just putting some shine on friends, but with 80 bands on the schedule, take your tips where you can get them.

Did you forget the outdoor stage at Grove Street Lot? It gained steam throughout the day, welcoming back Nice veteran Layzi, Hush Club, Divine Sweater (who we caught at Boston Calling), the ubiquitous Pile, Bay Faction, local-adjacent Palehound, and dance rockers Vundabar as headliner.

Will the outdoor stage survive into next year? Will Nice Fest survive into next year? Will humanity survive into next year? As low-wattage science fiction constantly reminds us, with sweaty palms and wide eyes: “Human beings are the virus!” Really makes you think, I think.

Checking in for one last round at The Rockwell on a Saturday night at Nice Fest. Dead Friends Club used to have more friends in it the last time or two I covered them. Like, 7,8, or 9 people up on a dais for some smooth and soulful pop. For the festival appearance they trimmed themselves down to a tighter trio, which, thankfully, still sports the harp. Rock harp, making a comeback.

Extra points to solo guitarist Aubrey Haddard for rocking the Zelda t-shirt. What’s this genre? Rock ambient 16-bit minimalism?

I think one of the guitarists for Ohio State Fair (the one getting peeved by the audience’s reaction to the name of the band, Ohio State Fair) is in maybe a million bands. Or at least Pew Pew, plus another I might have seen at Nice, slipping my mind. Prolific. Which lends further credence to my theory that there are really only five or six bands in the Boston area, and they just keep rearranging the deck chairs to keep you guessing.

Who headlined Crystal Ballroom on Saturday night? Burp., of course. The period is part of their name because why not. Colossal big energy noisemakers and merry pranksters of rock. A ripping way to end the night after Ovlov (which includes two members of Pet Fox) parachuted in for an emergency substitution set after the scheduled reunion show by Grass Is Green fell through. A reunion that fails to reunite. A candle in the wind. A plastic grocery store bag (remember those? so beautiful!) ballooning in the breeze. These are a few of my favorite things…

No drinks allowed while riding the mechanized rodeo pickle.

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