Bill Gwynn was taking stock of the audience, his eyes narrowing on a crowd of around 25 as he pulled the mic from its stand, stepped forward on the stage and turned his back sharply, rolling his shoulders in a dead-on Honey Boo Boo. Cheers exploded from the crowd. His hips swayed violently, a low-slung belt glinting as he began to fervently rub it against his hindquarters, this punk-rock striptease of a thing. Then he turned again, took a leap off the stage, and kicked off an electrifying set.
Lucy Gellman Photo
Straight out of Albany, N.Y. — or as he put it, “the city that’s right next to fucking purgatory” — Gwynn and his band New Red Scare stole the show last Friday night at Three Sheets, drawing a crowd of punk rock enthusiasts seasoned and new. While the group was intended to be a sort of musical amuse bouche in between New Haven’s The Lost Riots and Brooklyn-based Two Man Advantage, they were ultimately the highlight of the night, Gwynn’s performance reaching as close to transcendent as punk or punkish can.
That’s partly because what New Red Scare performs is neither punk nor rock, nor punk rock. At least, not like any you’ve heard live before. Fronting the group with the performance sensibilities of a drag queen and the lungs of a lion, Gwynn has created his own brand of what might be described as “sensual hockey rock:” music that vibrates all the way through you and exists for the sole purpose of scoring a high-stakes Stanley Cup game. What makes it perfect it that it stops there, circumventing the particularly washed-up, macho-in-all-the-wrong-ways constituent base that trickled in for Two Man Advantage as they mounted the stage in hockey gear and played a pulpy, drown-the-room-out-in-sound set that was intended to score two guys beating each other bloody.
Gwynn has mastered the right balance, and knows how to work a space brilliantly. Full disclosure: I do not mosh, thrash, wash my hair with beer, or like being carried on the hands of men I don’t know, and all of these were requisite behavior for Two Man Advantage’s performance. The guys are proficient musicians and it’s very possible I missed some singular thing about their music while flying halfway across the room. But the New Red Scare? You could listen to them all night long. Simple as that. Yes, sweet Billy Gwynn — that’s how you feel about him by the end of the performance — might get nose to nose with you. It would be to sing, ever so loudly, along.
