nothin Four Bands Play To City’s Pulse | New Haven Independent

Four Bands Play To City’s Pulse

Brian Slattery Photo

It’s been a while since we’ve played out,” said Xavier Serrano near the beginning of Kindred Queers set. It didn’t sound like it. The harmonies were as tight, the rhythms as fluid, the band members as good as picking up each other’s cues, as ever.

It was the beginning of an evening that showed what four working bands in New Haven were up to these days — and maybe offered a glimpse into some of what’s making the city tick.

The good crowd that turned out Thursday night at the Spaceland Ballroom heard Kindred Queer, Elison Jackson, Head with Wings, and José Oyola and the Astronauts each put on strong sets of music. There’s real musical diversity among them. Kindred Queer pulls from the spacier side of folk rock, Elison Jackson from Americana, Head with Wings from prog, and José Oyola and the Astronauts from pop, soul, hip hop, and Latin music. But hearing them, one after the other, also showed the common sound between them, a taste for something gritty, a little strange, a willingness to push the audience.

For Kindred Queer, that push came from the music itself. The band — Serrano on guitar and vocals, Shannon Kiley on cello, and Quinn Pirie on drums — embraced scales and melodies you don’t usually hear in pop music, surprising changes in tempo, and sprawling song structures, executed with narcotic ease.

Following in the footsteps of Dylan, Neil Young, Wilco, and others, Elison Jackson used its originals, comfortably in the tradition of well-built American songwriting, to jump into raucous improvisation. The band, led by songwriter and lead singer Sam Perduta, was trying out a new lineup, and judging from the sound they got, it was working.

Head with Wings, composed of Joshua Corum on vocals and guitar, Brandon Cousino on guitar, Joe Elliott on bass, and Andrew Testa on drums, unleashed their own brand of tight prog-inflected art rock that also, well, rocked.

And José Oyola and the Astronauts — who go by their first names only, Kelly, Alex, Will, and Kyle — hopped through a set of soulful originals interspersed with crowd-pleasing covers, including the seasonally appropriate Feliz Navidad” to send the audience home on just the right note.

Does New Haven have an aesthetic? Something that the city generates in its artists? Something in the music, art, and literature that it produces that can be identified as from here and nowhere else? The set at the Spaceland Ballroom — like Puma Simone’s, Siul Hughes’s, and Ibn Orator’s stuff—suggested that it does; it’s just up to us to hear it.

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