Sunday Re, Cap: Nice!
‘Denouement’ is a French word at Nice Fest on Sunday, 28 July 2024.
OK, let’s wrap it up.
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.
Sunday
Model/Actriz / House of Harm / Gift / Lucy (Cooper B. Handy)
Alex Walton / Animal Hospital / Cheem / Cherubhead / Corporeal / Joyer / Mercy Ruin / Misuser / Ribbon / Rougarou / Slow Quit / Summer Cult / The Collect Pond / The Rupert Selection / The Croaks / Vivid Bloom / Warmachine / Women In Peril / Zip Tie Handcuffs
(7/28/24)
‘Denouement’ is a wonderful word that you learned in English class to describe the part of a narrative associated with ‘falling action.’
By the fourth and final day of Nice, A Fest the tide had already risen to its highest mark with three stages the previous day. The waters have no choice but to recede. Don’t sleep on Sunday, though, which boasted a long and lanky lineup on two stages at the Rockwell and Crystal Ballroom with some of the heaviest music all the long weekend.
If you had attended all three prior days of the fest, though, this is the day that you might finally start to feel like the festival, as a whole, was not designed for human consumption. What I mean is that any ticketed musical event, whether it lasts one-hour, one-day, or one-month, has an audience in mind. A theoretical set of individuals and groups of individuals who map onto the kind and the amount of music on offer. If that theoretical audience exists in real life, you can sell tickets to them, and if the event delivers what it promises, everyone is happy.
I don’t think there was an audience in real life for four days of Nice Fest. Whether or not any 4-day passes sold (they did) is immaterial. Whether or not there was music worth listening to on all four days (there was) is immaterial.
What marks the difference between a festival as a feast and a festival as a firehose of sound is giving a nod to the scale and shape of human attention. Like telling a good story, you want to give people a beginning, middle, and an ending.
An appetizer, main course, and dessert.
A bed that’s too hard, too soft, and just right.
Porridge that’s too hot, too cold, and blissfully lukewarm. Otherwise, four days of music is too much like a Spotify playlist on endless shuffle & repeat. It makes music that should sound different, sound samey, and you don’t want that.
Nice Fest 2024 made some gestures toward the idea of narrative arc. At the start, an intimate Thursday lineup (Nice veterans, one stage, smaller bill). At the finish, Model/Actriz were superlative in the closing slot on the closing day, with an ecstatic performance that understood their role as cathartic release for the festival as a whole.
Between those two slices of bread, though? Not much programmatic articulation in the meaty middle.
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.
Bands with ‘head’ at the end of their name, like Cherubhead opening at Crystal Ballroom, tend to rock hard. Maybe it’s just a Godhead association. But I’m also thinking of my 10th grade guitar teacher, Greg Passler, who played in a band called Childhead that rocked the way early grunge bands rocked.
Cherubhead
You know, when the Pearl Jams and Soundgardens and Mother Love Bones and Alice In Chains and Mudhoneys all had long hair, big axes, and heavy shredding solos. They all disowned their metal heritage, but looking at and listening to them, you could be excused for not seeing a decisive artistic break.
In retrospect, the band name ‘Childhead’ was a little iffy. Greg was a great teacher though, who encouraged creativity, following your star, instead of just assimilating scale after scale. I was really into altered tunings at the time, a la Sonic Youth, and the whole self-taught, No Wave, guitar primitive thing. And he was like “Go for it!”, making him obsolete as a teacher, which is the most teacherly thing in the best sense of teacher that a teacher can do.
Thank you, Greg!
For all the breadth and depth of the Nice schedule (book 80 bands, you’re going to have some breadth and depth), there wasn’t much in the way of genuine experimentalism. Musicians trying to grow the way you appreciate music.
Instead, it was a lot of three- and four-piece lineups that went guitar, guitar, bass, drums, as the case may be, which modeled their musical approaches on artists with established mainstream success. There are times you can feel the presence of the music schools in this town, teeming with earnest students who want to flex their chops no matter how heavily trafficked the path they find themselves upon.
Animal Hospital
Credit Animal Hospital for not looking or sounding like any other band in the 4-day lineup. The man behind the moniker Kevin Micka centers his music around what looks like a homemade noisemaking rig. The kind of machine you’d expect to see the Wizard of Oz or Willy Wonka fooling with.
What sort of music does it make? A kind of ticking, buzzing, burping echo, which can produce noise on its own, or integrate with guitars and DIY accessories to expand the sound. The artist just released an LP called Shelf Life, “a dozen years in the making,” via Sipsman.
Hey, the label is run by Mike Caulo, who I knew from Twitter back when Twitter was fun, years ago, and met him IRL at a club somewhere in the Boston area. I forget where. But he skipped town shortly thereafter for a gig working at the offices of Merge Records in North Carolina. Which is absolutely the dream job for a certain kind of person into a certain kind of music. Cool to see he’s still doing music stuff. Check out Sipsman. Along with Animal Hospital, releases by Krill (transmuted to Knot, I think?), Katie Von Schleicher, and more.
Vivid Bloom are pretty fucking gnarly with loud sounds and some blownout textures on the guitars that make your synapses stand on end. Not that the preceding act, Animal Hospital, is a quietcore, but the transition from one band to another provided a bit of a jolt. Like, wow, some people play this softly, or this loudly, or this my-ears-are-bleeding, all within the space of three sets.
Alex Walton
Another whiplash transition at Crystal Ballroom later, from Alex Walton to Cheem, which wasn’t so much about volume as attitude. With Alex Walton you have a two-piece, guitar and drums, kicking out heavy minimalist pop. There’s a kind of latter day Rat Pack lounge humor routine between the drummer and guitarist, which is actually funny as hell. Contrast that with the full-time earnest bubblegum funk pop of Cheem, who have no time to crack jokes. They’re all about cranking out the hitz, baybeeeee!
If you were really looking for quietcore quietude, the Ribbon set at The Rockwell might have been the quietest set of the entire 4-day fest. Two seated guitarists, more or less whispering into microphones. There was a little cello on their recent debut album I Watched The Ribbon, but as far as I saw the elegant instrument didn’t make an appearance at the Nice gig.
Not sure at all what I witnessed with the Lucy set at Crystal Ballroom. Or Cooper B. Handy? Felt like a prank. But you gotta root for an artist out of Hadley, MA. Pioneer Valley…
Most live reviews at Hump Day News are accompanied by a video recap, which we produce in a 1:1 format and a 16:9 format for Youtube. The videos are not meant to be long, so the performance clips that make them up are necessarily short. Having said that, sometimes things go long. Sometimes you’re filming a band like Slow Quit, and there wasn’t an opportune time to cut short. Or maybe there was an opportune moment but you just didn’t feel like it. Anyway, long clip in the Sunday recap of Slow Quit, a hazy, gazey, loud band playing on the bottom floor of The Rockwell.
Is Mercy Ruin darkwave? I’m warming to the idea.
At a local music fest that goes deep you get exactly what you’d think you’d get: a bill composed of Yahtzee rolls that jigsaw the same musicians into a thousand (or at least 80) different combinations to fill out the schedule. The members of Joyer, Rougarou, and The Croaks jigsaw in different ways into the local music scene, including some bands that also played the festival.
Pure aside: what constitutes a dive bar?
The lead banjo guy from Rougarou went on a long, multi post, late night rant recently via Instagram about what makes a dive bar a dive bar. Don’t look for the IG stories, much like the Electric Banana, they’re no longer there. But the gist was as follows.
He offered a kind of class critique of dive bar culture that called out anyone besides low income patrons as tourists. You know, patrons that luxuriate in the grime as a way to cosplay themselves out of their financially-secured existential boredom.
That all sounds basically right until he went off the rails when he stipulated that dive bars need to be “dangerous” and claimed there were no dive bars in Massachusetts. The latter is a foolish claim, but I can understand that if you have unreasonable criteria for what counts as a dive bar, then it’s easy to see them everywhere or nowhere.
I find the “dangerous” criterion to be both unreasonable and unpalatable.
Last first. It’s unpalatable because strictly defining a dive bar as a gathering spot for low income patrons AND dangerous suggests that low income individuals are dangerous. Which is bullshit. Which plays into the same condescending, classist bullshit that I’m guessing the worthwhile part of his dive bar rant was rallying against. Why do that?
And the “dangerous” criterion is unreasonable because it doesn’t offer a good explanation for how a dive bar distinguishes itself from a non-dive bar. There are plenty of so-called “respectable” bars that are dangerous to anyone some of the time, and some people all of the time. You don’t have to work your powers of imagination or observation too hard to call upon an example of a dangerous and “respectable” bar.
Let me offer a different standard for what makes a dive bar a dive bar. It’s a bar-centric standard that doesn’t lose sight of what a bar does: sell booze. That’s right. No matter how else you try to dress up a bar – highway to the dangerzone, music acts, trivia nights, novelty snacks, meetingplace for friends, family, and community – at the end of the day it does not exist if it doesn’t sell enough booze. That’s the core mission in a capitalist economy. And a dive bar is a bar that navigates the shortest distance between the start and finish line of the booze selling mission.
For that reason, the signature hallmarks of a dive bar are barflies. I don’t simply mean regulars. I mean the type of regular who is visibly drinking to annihilate themselves, in part or whole, and whose commitment to the task frightens the uninitiated. A bar that cultivates these customers has charted a dive bar path for itself. Massachusetts has these kinds of bars. Boston has these kinds of bars. These are dive bars.
Are dive bars “dangerous”? Sometimes, I guess? More to the point, like a drunk, a dive bar is mostly just groggy.
Zip-Tie Handcuffs
Shout out to Summer Cult, whose band name sounds like a hardcore dark metal blowout, but they’re more about high energy, fun anthems, and pop punk than Satanism. And bonus points to Zip-Tie Handcuffs for closing out The Rockwell after rocking well for three out of four days of the festival. Digital Awareness, which had been manning the basement with visuals the whole time, looked good & ready to come up for fresh air.
Gift was a highlight at Crystal Ballroom. The NYC-based psych outfit goes long on krautrock-influenced guitar rock numbers. Their latest album Illuminator is out via Captured Tracks.
Closer of closers, Model/Actriz finished the fest with a pit-crashing set of dark, clubby electro rock, led by the Minister of Mayhem frontman Cole Haden. He did everything in his power, save straddle the mechanical rodeo pickle, to give the Nice crowd one last jolt before they were shuffled out the door.
Sounds like the Nice, A Fest team is already planning next year’s edition. They’ve already broken the seal on rebooking bands that have already played the festival (contra the Rock N Roll Rumble — no repeats!), so all types of bill reshuffles remain in play.
Local music is a restless beast in a state of constant evolution. But let’s be honest: it doesn’t evolve quick enough to accommodate 80 new bands worth listening to at a single fest each and every year.
Gestation time is important.
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