The Almighty Yellow Star.
Guitar strings plucked with grace and care, voices keening in the air, and one of the most attentive audiences seen anywhere in months made for an intense and intimate evening of music Saturday at Best Video Film and Cultural Center in Hamden.
Sarah LeMieux opened the night with a solo set of self-described “sad jazz,” as she backed up precise, arresting vocals with sparse, harmonically dense guitar, guiding the audience through a set of songs that curlicued their way through their forms while delivering a lot of atmosphere, wistful, sometimes forlorn, but never devoid of hope. The audience was utterly silent for every note, and broke into thick applause at the end of each number.
She explained that in the summer of 2019, she was hanging out with friends in Vermont around a bonfire, and “we were talking about how jazz has dystopian undertones” if you interpret the American songbook in a certain way. The result was the recording project Jazz for the End of the World, which she recorded that fall with Aaron Wyanski, Ethan Foote, and Andy Chatfield. They put it out, coincidentally, just as the pandemic arrived. “In March of 2020,” as the album came out a week into the shutdown, “we were like, ‘what did we do?’ ”
The album is a collection of jazz standards, along with an original from LeMieux (which she performed) called “Goodbye Paris.” The song — which she reassured her colleagues was not “a cry for help” when she sent a demo to them — took on a new and different meaning for her when the shutdown started.
She continued with her set. “More sad jazz!” she said. “I’m really a happy person. The ability of music to hold our emotions and process them is a really powerful thing.”
Toward the end of her time, LeMieux sang a song about what it might be like to be a song. “If I were a song, I would make all of you fall in love,” she sang. “I wish I were a song.” She followed it up with the suggestion that perhaps her song wasn’t just a poetic gesture; because the cells in our body are fully replaced every seven years, in a way, the thing that makes each of us who we are is nothing more than a pattern that the cells move through, the way that a song is just patterns on paper given life through performance.
“I’m going to stop saying weird things to you,” she said. The crowd didn’t seem to mind.
Next up was The Almighty Yellow Star, a new project from Kierstin Sieser (of Tiny Ocean) on vocals and guitar, Samantha Miller on bass and vocals, and Paul Belbusti (of Mercy Choir) on drums, guitar, and vocals. Where LeMieux’s set had felt like a chat with a friend, The Almighty Yellow Star’s set felt more like a happening. Spacious electric guitar, simple and precise bass, and drum parts stripped to their essentials made for a sound that filled the room and made it feel bigger than it was, vast and open. In that musical landscape, Sieser’s voice rang like a bell, sometimes supported by Miller and Belbusti. Sieser’s songs — two of which can be found on a recent EP — felt both despairing and devotional, rolling complex emotions together, sinking down without ever succumbing. The effect was hypnotic. No one in the audience said a word.
About two-thirds of the way through the set, after an especially stark song, Sieser said “I promise I won’t leave you there, guys. Sorry.” She followed it up with a song about strength, and about finding it by letting go. “Carry yourself like a king,” she sang. “don’t drink in the power / be strong in the moment you’re in / but soft like a flower.”
The audience responded with intense applause at the end of the set, demanding one more song even as the performers made it clear that, being a new band, they’d played all the songs they knew. But Sieser obliged with a final number, a quiet melody to carry everyone home.
