From Lowell, With Love
Burp. at the Middle East ClubBurp. pushes out excess air from its upper digestive tract at Middle East Club on Friday, 1 March 2024.
Mill City mania dials up to eleven in Cambridge with The Peacocks, Class President, and The Ghouls making magic in the opening slots.
The second bathroom in the Upstairs finally gets fixed.
Four bands traveled south from Lowell to Cambridge to play a diverse four-stack bill at the Middle East Club. Plenty of hometown supporters made the trip too, selling out the show.
Mill City!
Will you follow the breadcrumbs back north at the end of April when the Town & City Festival takes flight for a two day celebration of music & art?
The festival in Lowell has always been a great platform for the town to celebrate their local artists. Burp. will be playing this year for sure. Tysk Tysk Task, as well, the neo grunge rawkers covered in these pages many times before. And Class President played last year.
You don’t need to be from Lowell to make the schedule. Some of these bands are probably not from the hometown of Jack Kerouac (but who knows in this day and age of “Boston-based” bands?): Linnea’s Garden, Impossible Dog, Kid Afternoon, The Roscoes, D-Tension, Connor Hennessy, Fantastic Cat, Rick Berlin and the Nickel & Dime Band, Colleen Green, Coral Moons, Drug Deal Gone Rad, Sapling…
And these are just the bands Hump Day News has covered around Boston. Some big names are coming from further afield. The festival dug up Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, an indie rock powerhouse led by Alec Ounsworth. Kind of Violent Femmes with a synth-tinged, new millennium indie rock update. The band dissolved while it was still at its peak. CYHSY rides again!
Feel the Lowell magic!
The Ghouls
Shades of the Strokes with a little more of a gutterpunk vibe. It’s The Ghouls! Not lacking in a sense of humor, evidenced by a mustache shaving ceremony for the bassist. There was a contest, and shaving the bassist in the middle of the show was the prize for the contest winner. All in a day’s work. The band rolled out a cover of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” at just the right moment, which is any moment.
One day you wake up, roll out of bed, and suddenly realize you’ve covered Class President a decent amount of times. Check out a few of the posts in the Archive. There’s even one from 2022 when the guitarist parachuted into a emo pop punk bill in the backroom of the Silhouette Lounge, playing a solo acoustic set.
If the band’s Bandcamp page (which they seemed to have abandoned for the release of their most recent EP good thinking.) reads right, their EP Ellipsis came out in 2020. You figure about a year to write and record the songs, and at least a year before that of dithering about, maybe in other bands, trying to figure out if this new band (maybe we’ll call it “Class President”?) is going to be a thing.
So let’s credit the band with about six years in existence. You can let me know in the comments if that’s way off. What sort of water has flowed under the bridge in six years?
Class President
The EPs, of course. Plenty of live shows. A supportive base of friends, family, and fans, if the sold out show at the Middle East was any indication. And a whole lotta playing of your songs, whether in performance, at practice, or in a studio.
You could tell the guitarists had played “Wander,” a song off Ellipsis, about ten million times by the way the band trotted out the number in the middle of their set. Not begrudgingly, but definitely with a sense of humor and a hint of irony. The jangly contrapuntal guitar pattern, a kind of hypertwee indie rock riffery that forms the signature sound of the song, was dropped almost entirely out the second or third verse. Instead, the guitarist simply surfed the vocals over the bass and drums, letting the rhythm section do the work.
It’s the kind of move you make in performance when you feel super comfortable with a song. And surrounded by all those friends, family, and fans, why should Class President feel any other way?
The Peacocks
Shades of southern rock just crashed through the roof of the Middle East club like the Allman Brother’s Boeing 720 (AKA the Starship). Or is that Stevie Ray Vaughn that just stepped out of the pod bay doors, Hal? Don’t doubt the breadth and variety of music coming out of Lowell. The Peacocks are not the type of band you’d expect to be based in Lowell, with the sultry guitar-led swagger of rock gods unknown in these northern climates. Maybe you should adjust your expectations.
Burp.. With a period. The band must have gone to the same school of rock n roll grammar as Class President with their good thinking. EP. But there are no rules when it comes to spelling band names, song names, or album names. Let it rip.
Burp.
The four-piece rawkers are goofballs with chops.
There’s almost a prog-like approach to the songwriting – you know, a fine-grained attention to the details that most bands fast forward through. The stops, the starts, the micro-crescendos and -diminuendoes, quick gags, and musical punch lines.
Don’t let the band name or general air of chicanery fool you, this squad comes to compete.
Extra points for the Burp. banner.
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