Thursday Re, Cap: Nice!
Dutch Tulips boom and bust as dodgy investment products in the closing slot at Nice, A Fest on Thursday, 25 July 2024.
Haasan Barclay, Rusty Mullet, Pink Navel, and Sweet Petunia stock a lineup of veterans at the 2024 kickoff.
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.
Thursday
Dutch Tulips / Haasan Barclay
Pink Navel / Rusty Mullet / Sweet Petunia
Thursday’s kickoff at Crystal Ballroom stocked a lineup of artists who have graced the Nice stage before. Start off on the right foot by rocking with the folks who’ve already been there and done that. War torn veterans. They’ve been in the shit. Got that 1,000 yard stare into the stony depths of Niceness.
(7/25/24)DIY commandos ready to roll in the Ballroom above Davis Square, a gorgeous music hall built the same year that World War I began, which sounds like terrible timing, but America didn’t send troops until three years later, so that’s at least three years of wholesome fun before anyone you knew got killed in the trenches. Don’t sit on the windowsills!
There are countless tasks to perform prior to the kickoff of a four-day music fest, including opening the front door. Once the front door was unlocked, Nice, A Fest 2024 took flight.
Facing the stage, the line of tables on the left wall belonged to sponsors and the line of tables on the right side belonged to merch.
Shoutout to the free Downeast cider samples, though acquiring the mini-cup of liquid (you know, the kind you gargle with at the dentist’s office) usually involved a short wait in line and some brisk marketing repartee with an earnest Downeast representative. Better to cut out the middleman and offer an unguarded cooler of your stuff, like the Topo Chico cooler. But I suppose the “remarkably drinkable” cider packs a 5.1% abv. punch, so you want to police that.
Aside from food and beverage sponsors, activist org Counting All Crows was also in the tabling mix. The Jamaica Plain-based non-profit mobilizes, channels, and harnesses the power of music to kill assholery in the music industry, with a feminist slant. Check it out.
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.
No takers on the mechanized pickle ride during Sweet Petunia’s set though. The alt folk duo is a smart choice to open. The string-picking and satisfying vocal harmonies is a good way to warm up your ears. Not everyone is ready for uptempo rock n roll straight out of the gate. Ease us into the four-day mosaic with some Americana comfort food, laced with Dolly Parton spunkery.
Sweet Petunia
The pair traded banjos and guitars, and debuted some new material. It was the kind of set where your toddler didn’t have to wear their designer earmufflers, if you had a toddler at the show with designer earmufflers.
Speaking of which, there was a toddler at the show with designer earmufflers. And for the first time ever, unless my ears deceived me, I think I heard an artist onstage calling that out as a questionable parenting decision (it wasn’t Sweet Petunia). Loud noises, low visibility, big bodies, sudden movements, alcohol and pickle juice. Stuff can go sideways. At the risk of concern trolling, it’s an honest question.
Your gut response is probably “Of course a parent will do what needs to be done to watch their kid!” Of course…
Then again, the Department of Children and Families in Massachusetts has a one billion dollar annual budget, 4,200 employees, and it’s not for nothing.
And you always hear those stories about working class parents getting arrested for letting their kids run wild in public spaces. You ever wonder if it’s cultural cues that signal a certain socio-economic status, like designer earmufflers, that exempt some parents from the scrutiny received by others? Is the whole “free range parenting” thing a function of race and class privilege?
By the way, I wasn’t kidding about opening the front doors. Start time for music was 7PM. Doors were scheduled for 6PM, and they weren’t open at 6PM. Not a problem. But I noticed Pink Navel sitting out front at the cafe tables in front of Mr Crêpe and couldn’t help but wonder if the artists were locked out too…
Pink NavelNot likely; all the soundchecking must have been done earlier in the day because the bill, from Sweet Petunia through the closer Dutch Tulips, ran smoothly without any interruption by between-set sound tweaking.
Pink Navel’s set looped in some new material, post-How To Capture Playful. The hip hop artist must be in a kind of transitional period following the big promotional push accompanying the full-length album.
If creating is a habit you love, it must get kind of stale to keep pushing the same product, no matter how much you love it. The artist has been playing a few gigs lately under the header of a different indie folk project First Passionate Frisbee Club. Maybe doing some soul searching. So get out to upcoming shows at O’Brien’s Pub and Midway Cafe while you can.
Who knows what the future holds. Maybe it holds nothing?
Rusty Mullet
Another item to file under the general headers of Introspection, All Things Must End, and Closure, the bluesy art-rawking trio of Rusty Mullet might have played its final local gig before the fronter takes off to Berlin. Forever? What counts as ‘forever’ these days? Whatever it is, it’s pretty long.
Haasan Barclay is an artist who constantly reinvents himself. Which is refreshing, though you’re never quite sure which musical avatar will show up.
We’re not talking about Ziggy Stardust-level identity changes. But there is a definite swing between Barclay as a solo electronic artist and Barclay in his ensemble mode.
We’ve covered the former as far back as the beats-n-synth DUAL SHOCK album. He mixed a guitar into this electronic approach at his 2022 Nice, A Fest performance, playing a cherry red six-string over a chorus of backing tracks, which had us wondering at the time: why not just cash out those backing tracks as real musicians and make a go of it as a live ensemble?
Easier said than done, but it wasn’t too long before Haasan Barclay rolled out a full band in a live gig at The Rockwell. Sounded great; a mix of genres for a sound that resisted easy categorization, but had the strong earmarks of rock, world, funk, and pop. At this point, if you’ve seen the artist perform multiple times, you probably have your own favorite version. The ensemble version is mine. There’s magic a group of musicians makes together that can’t be replicated in solo acts.
Haasan BarclayEnsemble be damned. It was back to solo electro for Haasan Barclay at his 2024 Nice, A Fest performance.
The portions of the set in which he picked up the guitar for more six-strings & backing tracks jams showed where he’s come from. Solid, though low energy compared to the rest of his time on stage, which was devoted to the artist straight up vamping with a mic over pre-recorded songs. Beat heavy, dance friendly, and often mashups of classic tunes from NIN and otherwise.
Did it give off MTV Beach House vibes, especially when he went shirtless? Sure. But people loved the MTV Beach House! Haasan Barclay could have played that schtick all night.
If we’re not getting Barclay in the ensemble mode, give us 90s Beach House Rave Dance Party Barclay FTW.
Dutch Tulips
Dutch Tulips closed out. The same indie rockers that played In Between Days ways back in the days that that festival was still a festival. In other words, a year ago. What happened? Bring back In Between Days! C’mon Magleby, Quincy needs this…
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